Mac OS X in a Nutshell

Finder Views

The Finder serves as a graphical file manager, which offers three ways (or Views) to look at the files, folders, applications, and other filesystems mounted on your system. The Finder also sports a toolbar at the top of the window, which gives you quick access to frequently used files and directories, along with a built-in Search field for context-based searches.

More on the Finder toolbar and how to search for files later; for now, let’s look at the three Views available to the Finder: Icon, List, and the new Column View. To select any of these views for a Finder window, click on the View menu and select “as Icons” (

-1), “as List” (

-2), or “as Columns” (

-3), respectively.

Depending on the View you’ve selected for your Finder window, you can also tweak the settings for that view by selecting View → Show View Options (

-J). The View Options for each View will be discussed in the sections that follow.

Icon View

This shows the contents of a directory as file, folder, or an application icons, as shown in Figure 2-1. In this view, every Finder object appears as an icon of a variable ...