macOS Sierra: The Missing Manual

Get Info

By clicking an icon and then choosing File→Get Info (or press -I, or touch Get Info on the Touch Bar [The Complicated Story of the Function Keys], if you’ve installed one there), you open an important window like the one shown in Figure 3-13. It’s a collapsible, multipanel screen that provides a wealth of information about a highlighted icon. For example:

• For a document icon, you see when it was created and modified, and what programs it “belongs” to.

• For an alias, you learn the location of the actual icon it refers to.

• For a program, you can turn on Prevent App Nap (Up to Speed: Where Your Free Hour of Battery Life Came From).

• For a disk icon, you get statistics about its capacity and how much of it is full.

• If nothing is selected, you get information about the desktop itself (or the open window), including the amount of disk space consumed by everything on or in it.

  

  Bottom: Or, if you click each flippy triangle to open its corresponding panel of information (or Option-click to expand them all at once), it can be as huge as this—shown here split in two because the book isn’t tall enough to show the whole thing. The resulting dialog box can easily grow taller than your screen, which is a good argument for either (a) closing the panels you don’t need at any given moment or (b) running ...