Mac OS X Panther in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

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’s Sidebar gives you quick access to frequently used files and directories.

The three Views available in the Finder window are Icon, List, and 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 select 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 view 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 size. Icons can be arbitrarily arranged within a window by dragging and dropping them to different locations. If you find that icons are overlapping or out of order, you can clean up the ...