Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Panther Edition

List View

In windows that contain a lot of icons, the list view is a powerful weapon in the battle against chaos. It shows you a tidy table of your files’ names, dates, sizes, and so on.

You have complete control over your columns, in that you get to decide how wide they should be, which of them should appear, and in what order (except that Name is always the first column). Here’s how to master these columns:

Sorting the List

Most of the world’s list view fans like their files listed alphabetically. It’s occasionally useful, however, to view the newest files first, largest first, or whatever.

When a desktop window displays its icons in a list view, a convenient new strip of column headings appears (Figure 1-17). These column headings aren’t just signposts; they’re buttons, too. Click Name for alphabetical order, Date Modified to view newest first, Size to view largest files at the top, and so on.

Figure 1-17. You control the sorting order of a list view by clicking the column headings (top). Click a second time to reverse the sorting order (bottom). You’ll find the identical triangle—indicating the identical information —in email programs, in Sherlock (Chapter 20), and anywhere else where reversing the sorting order of the list can be useful.

It’s especially important to note the tiny, dark gray triangle that appears in the column you’ve most recently clicked. It shows you which way the list is being sorted.

When the triangle points upward, oldest files, smallest files, or files beginning with numbers (or the letter A) appear at the top of the list, depending on which sorting criterion you have selected.

Tip

It may help you to remember that when the smallest portion of the triangle is at the top, the smallest files are listed first when viewed in size order.

To reverse the sorting order, just click the column heading a second time. Now newest files, largest files, or files beginning with the letter Z appear at the top of the list. The tiny triangle turns upside-down.

Tip

You can also change the sorting order from the keyboard. Just press Control-Tab to highlight each successive column heading, sorting the list by that criterion in the process. Add the Shift key to move leftward through the column headings.

Flippy Triangles

One of the Mac’s most attractive features is the tiny triangle that appears to the left of a folder’s name in a list view. In its official documents, Apple calls these buttons disclosure triangles; internally, the programmers call them flippy triangles.

Figure 1-18. Click a “flippy triangle” (left) to see the list of the folders and files inside that folder (right). Or press the equivalent keystrokes: -right arrow (to open) and -left arrow (to close).

Either way, these triangles are very useful: When you click one, the list view turns into an outline, which displays the contents of the folder in an indented list, as shown in Figure 1-18. Click the triangle again to collapse the folder listing. You’re saved the trouble and clutter of opening a new window just to view the folder’s contents.

By selectively clicking flippy triangles, you can, in effect, peer inside two or more folders simultaneously, all within a single list view window. You can move files around by dragging them onto the tiny folder icons.

Tip

Once you’ve expanded a folder by clicking its flippy triangle, you can even drag a file icon out of its folder so that it’s loose in the list view window. To do so, drag it directly upward onto the column headings area (where it says Name, for example). When you release the mouse, you’ll see that the file is no longer inside the expanded folder.

Which Columns Appear

Choose View→Show View Options. In the palette that appears, you’re offered on/off checkboxes for the different columns of information Mac OS X can show you, as illustrated in Figure 1-19.

• Date Modified. This date-and-time stamp indicates when a document was last saved. Its accuracy, of course, depends on the accuracy of your Mac’s built-in clock (see Section 8.6).

POWER USERS’ CLINICFlippy Triangle Keystrokes

The keystrokes that let you open and close flippy triangles in a list view are worth committing to memory.

First, pressing the Option key when you click a flippy triangle lets you view a folder’s contents and the contents of any folders inside it. The result, in other words, is a longer list that may involve several levels of indentation.

If you prefer to use the keyboard, substitute the right-arrow key (to expand a selected folder’s flippy triangle) or left-arrow key (to collapse the folder listing again). Here again, adding the Option key expands all levels of folders within the selected one.

Suppose, for example, that you want to find out how many files are in your Pictures folder. The trouble is, you have organized your graphics files within that folder in several category folders. And you realize that the “how many items” statistic in the status bar shows you how many icons are visible in the window. In other words, you won’t know your total photo count until you’ve expanded all the folders within the Pictures folder.

You could perform the entire routine from the keyboard like this: Get to your Home folder (see Section 2.1) by pressing Shift--H. Select the Pictures folder by typing the letter P. Open it by pressing -O (the shortcut for File→Open) or -down arrow. Highlight the entire contents by pressing -A (the shortcut for Edit→Select All).

Now that all folders are highlighted, press Option-right arrow. You may have to wait a moment for the Mac to open every subfolder of every subfolder. But eventually, the massive list appears, complete with many levels of indentation. At last, the “items” statistic in the status bar (see Section 1.2.11) gives you a complete, updated tally of how many files are in all of those folders combined.

Note

Many an up-to-date file has been lost because a Mac user spotted a very old date on a folder and assumed that the files inside were equally old. That’s because the modification date shown for a folder doesn’t reflect the age of its contents. Instead, the date on a folder indicates only when items were last moved into or out of that folder. The actual files inside may be much older, or much more recent.

Figure 1-19. The checkboxes you turn on in the View Options dialog box determine which columns of information appear in a list view window. Most people live full and satisfying lives with only the three default columns—Date Modified, Kind, and Size—turned on. But the other columns can be helpful in special circumstances; the trick is knowing what information appears there.

• Date Created. This date-and-time stamp shows you when a document was first saved.

• Size. With a glance, you can tell from this column how much disk space each of your files and folders is taking up in kilobytes, megabytes, or gigabytes—whichever the Mac thinks you’ll find most helpful. (There are 1,024 kilobytes in a megabyte.)

Tip

For disks and folders, you see only a dash—at first. You can, however, instruct the Mac to reveal their sizes, as described in Section 1.5.4.

• Kind. In this column, you can read what kind of icon each item represents. You may see, for example, Folder, JPEG Image, Application, and so on.

• Version. This column displays the version numbers of your programs. For folders and documents, you just see a dash.

• Comments. This rarely seen column can actually be among the most useful. Suppose that you’re a person who uses the Comments feature (highlight an icon, choose File→Get Info, type notes about that item into the Comments box). The option to view the first line of comments about each icon can be very helpful, especially when tracking multiple versions of your documents, as shown in Figure 1-20.

Note

Unfortunately, the systems for storing comments are different in Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. When you run Mac OS X, you won’t see the icon comments you added in Mac OS 9, and vice versa.

Figure 1-20. Left: The Comments column is often worth turning on. If your monitor is big enough, you can make the Comments column wide enough to show several paragraphs of text, all in a single line—enough to reveal the full life history of each icon. Right: You enter these comments in the Get Info window for each file.

• Label. This Macintosh perk, missing since Mac OS 9, has returned in 10.3 to the cheers of Mac veterans. Labels are colors and identifying phrases that you can slap onto icons, wherever they appear, to help you categorize and group them. For details, see Section 2.6.

  Even with this column turned off, you can still see an icon’s color, of course. But only by turning on this column do you get to see the text phrase that you’ve associated with each label.

Other View Options

The View Options for a list view include several other useful settings (choose View→ Show View Options, or press -J). As always, be sure to click either “All windows” or “This window only” before closing the window, so that your changes will have the scope of effect that you intended.

• Icon Size. These two buttons offer you a choice of icon size for the current window: either standard size or tiny size. Unlike icon view, list view doesn’t give you a size slider.

  Thanks to Mac OS X’s powerful graphics software, even the tiny icons aren’t so small that they show up blank. You still get a general idea of what they’re supposed to look like.

• Text size. As described in Section 1.5.3, you can change the type size for your icon labels, either globally or one window at a time.

• Show columns. Turn on the columns you’d like to appear in the current window’s list view, as described in the previous section.

• Use relative dates. In a list view, the Date Modified and Date Created columns generally display information in a format like this: “Tuesday, March 9, 2004.” (As noted below, the Mac uses shorter date formats as the column gets narrower.) But when the “Use relative dates” option is turned on, the Mac substitutes the word “Yesterday” or “Today” where appropriate, making recent files easier to spot.

• Calculate all sizes. See the box below.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONCalculate All Sizes

When I sort my list view by size, I see only dashes for folder sizes. What am I doing wrong?

Nothing at all; that’s normal. When viewing a Finder window, you see a Size statistic for each file. For folders and disks, however, you’re shown only an uninformative dash.

Most Mac fans study this anomaly only momentarily, scratch their chins, and then get back to their work. Former Windows users don’t even scratch their chins; Windows PCs never show folder-size or disk-size information in list views.

Here’s what’s going on: It can take a computer a long time to add up the sizes of all files inside a folder. Your System→ Library folder alone, for example, contains more than 1,500 files. Instead of making you wait while the Mac does all of this addition, Mac OS X simply shows you a dash in the Size column for a folder.

On occasion, however, you really do want to see how big your folders are. In such cases, choose View→Show View Options and turn on “Calculate all sizes.” You’ll see the folder sizes slowly begin to pop onto the screen, from the top of the window down, as the Mac crunches the numbers of the files within.

In fact, you can even turn on the “Calculate all sizes” option globally—that is, for all windows. In the Mac operating systems of days gone by, this act would have caused a massive slowdown of the entire computer. But remember that Mac OS X is multithreaded—that is, it has the opposite of a one-track mind. It’s perfectly capable of devoting all of its attention to calculating your folder sizes and all of its attention to whatever work you’re doing in the foreground.

But now consider this anomaly: Suppose you’ve opted to sort a particular window by folder size—in other words, you’ve clicked the word Size at the top of the column. Turning on “Calculate all sizes” bewilders the unprepared, as folders arbitrarily begin leaping out of order, forcing the list to rearrange itself a couple of times per second.

What’s happening, of course, is that all folders begin at the bottom of the list, showing only dashes in the Size column. Then, as the Mac computes the size of your folders’ contents, they jump into their correct sorted order at what may seem to be random intervals.

Rearranging Columns

You’re stuck with the Name column at the far left of a window. But you can rearrange the other columns just by dragging their gray column headers horizontally. If the Mac thinks you intend to drop a column to, say, the left of the column it overlaps, you’ll actually see an animated movement—indicating a column reshuffling—even before you release the mouse button.

Adjusting Column Widths

Place your cursor carefully on the dividing line between two column headings. When the cursor sprouts horizontal arrows from each side, you can drag horizontally. Doing so makes the column to the left of your cursor wider or narrower.

What’s delightful about this activity is watching Mac OS X scramble to rewrite its information to fit the space you give it. For example, as you make the Date Modified (or Created) column narrower, “Tuesday, March 9, 2004, 2:22 PM” shrinks first to “Tue, Mar 9, 2004, 2:22 PM,” then to “3/9/04, 2:22 PM,” and finally to a terse “3/9/04.”

If you make a column too narrow, Mac OS X shortens the file names, dates, or whatever by removing text from the middle. An ellipsis (...) appears to show you where the missing text would have appeared. (Apple reasoned that truncating the ends of file names, as in previous versions of the Mac OS, would hide useful information like the number at the end of “Letter to Marge 1,” “Letter to Marge 2,” and so on. It would also hide the three-letter extensions, such as Thesis.doc, that may appear on file names in Mac OS X.)

NOSTALGIA CORNERPop-Up Windows

Help! How do I make pop-up windows in Mac OS X? You know, those little folder tabs that peek up from the bottom of the screen?

Apple figured you wouldn’t need them. After all, you can achieve the same effect by dragging folders into the Dock (Chapter 3). Once there, you can click a folder icon to open it, or view a pop-up list of its contents by Control-clicking it, right-clicking it (if you have a two-button mouse), or just holding the mouse button down on it.

But that’s not the real thing. If you do want the real thing, just drag any window to the bottom of the screen, so that only its title bar is showing. (First make the window narrow, if you like, so that its title bar turns into a little tab.) Put a whole row of window “tabs” down there, if you like.

Now you can make one of these tabs pop up in either of two ways. First, drag any file or folder icon off of your desktop, across the title bar, and down. Presto! After a short pause, the window pops open to receive your drag, just like the pop-up windows of Mac OS 9. It even recedes back to the screen edge if you move your mouse away without dropping what you’re dragging. (Unfortunately, it doesn’t collapse again if you release the mouse inside the window boundaries.)

If you’d rather have it pop up and stay up unaided, just click its green zoom button. The window springs upward and open so you can access its contents—and then collapses again when you click the green button a second time.

It’s not a real pop-up window, but it’s close. In the meantime, this trick does “real” pop-up windows one better: You can park your windows off any edge of the screen, not just the bottom. You haven’t lived until you’ve watched a window “drawer” slide open from the top or side of your monitor.

For example, suppose you’ve named a Word document “Madonna—A Major Force for Humanization and Cure for Depression, Acne, and Migraine Headache.” (Yes, file names can really be that long.) If the Name column is too narrow, you might see only “Madonna—A Major...Migraine Headache.”

Tip

You don’t have to make the column mega-wide just to read the full text of a file whose name has been shortened. Just point to the icon’s name without clicking. After a moment, a yellow, floating balloon appears—something like a tooltip in Microsoft programs—to identify the full name.

And if you don’t feel like waiting, hold down the Option key. As you whip your mouse over truncated file names, their tooltip balloons appear instantaneously. (Both of these tricks work in either list or column view—and in Save and Open dialog boxes, for that matter.)