OS X El Capitan: The Missing Manual

List View

In windows that contain a lot of icons, 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 (Figure 1-17).

You get to decide how wide your columns 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.

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 or triangles—indicating the identical information—in email programs, iTunes, and anywhere else where reversing the sorting order of a list can be useful.

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 ones first, or whatever.

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

Don’t miss the tiny or that appears in the column you’ve most recently clicked. It shows you which way the list is being sorted. When it’s , then the 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, click the column heading a second time. Now the shows you that the newest files, largest files, or files beginning with the letter Z appear at the top of the list.

Note

You can also change the sorting order using the Sort By command described earlier (in the View menu, the pop-up menu, or the View Options dialog box). But, honestly, clicking the column headings is much faster.

Arranging the List

You can arrange your list view into groups by name, date, kind, and so on, with tidy headings that help you make sense of it all. This unsung feature is described under Arrange By and Sort By.

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. (They don’t appear if you’ve sorted the window using the View→Arrange By menu.)

When you click one, the list view turns into an outline, showing 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.

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: (to open) and (to close).

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 the 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 see that the file is no longer inside the expanded folder.

Your Choice of Columns

Choose View→Show View Options. In the dialog box that appears, you’re offered on/off checkboxes for the different columns of information 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.

  Note

  Many an up-to-date file has been lost because someone 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. Many 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 when a document was first saved.

• Date Added. This option shows when a file was added to this folder or window.

• 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, gigabytes, or terabytes—whichever the Mac thinks you’ll find most helpful.

  Tip

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

• Kind. In this column, you can read what kind of file each icon 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 (Figure 1-20) can actually be among the most useful. Suppose you’re a person who uses the Comments feature (highlight an icon, choose File→Get Info, type notes about that item into the Spotlight Comments box). This column displays the first line of those comments about each icon, which comes in handy when tracking multiple versions of your documents.

• Tag. Tags are colors and identifying phrases that you can slap onto icons, wherever they appear, to help you categorize and group them. For details, see Broken Aliases.

GEM IN THE ROUGH: Flippy 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, then substitute (to expand a selected folder’s flippy triangle) or (to collapse the folder listing again). Here again, adding the Option key expands or collapses 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’ve 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 only 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 by pressing Shift-⌘-H. Select the Pictures folder by typing the letter P. Open it by pressing ⌘-O (the shortcut for File→Open) or ⌘-. Switch to list view, if necessary, with a quick ⌘-2. Highlight the entire contents by pressing ⌘-A (short for Edit→Select All).

Now that all folders are highlighted, press Option-. 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 gives you a complete, updated tally of how many files and folders, combined, are in the window.

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 you’ve associated with each label.

Figure 1-20. If your monitor is big enough, you can expand the Comments column to show several paragraphs, all in a single line–enough to reveal the full life history of each icon. (To enter some comments about an icon, type into the Spotlight Comments box in its Get Info, as shown here at bottom.)

Other View Options

The View Options for a list view include several other useful settings; choose View→Show View Options or press ⌘-J.

• Always open in list view. Turn on this option to override your system-wide preference setting for all windows. See Icon View Options for details.

• Browse in list view. Ensures that any folder inside this one will also open up in list view, even if its regularly scheduled view is something else.

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

  Fortunately, 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. 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, Date Added, and Date Created columns generally display information in a format like this: “Tuesday, March 5, 2016.” (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 words “Yesterday” or “Today” where appropriate, making recent files easier to spot.

• Calculate all sizes. See the box below.

• Show icon preview. Exactly as in icon view, this option turns the icons of graphics files into miniatures of the photos or images within.

• Use as Defaults. Click to make your changes in the View Options box apply to all windows on your Mac. (Option-click this button to restore a wayward window back to your defaults.)

Rearranging Columns

You’re stuck with the Name column at the far left of a window. However, 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.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION: Calculate 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 momentarily, scratch their chins, and then get back to their work. Former Windows people 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 over 100,000 files. Instead of making you wait while the Mac does all the addition, OS X simply shows you a dash in the folder’s Size column.

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 see the folder sizes slowly begin to pop onto the screen, from the top of the window down, as the Mac crunches the numbers on the files within. (You’ll know that the crunching is still in progress, because you’ll see the size statistics for some icons appear in light gray. That’s the Mac’s way of saying, “I’m not totally sure about this folder’s size yet.”)

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 OS X is multithreaded; it has the opposite of a one-track mind. It’s perfectly capable of devoting all its attention to calculating your folder sizes and to whatever work you’re doing in the foreground.

Now consider this anomaly: Suppose you’ve opted to sort a particular window by folder size—in other words, you’ve clicked 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.

Adjusting Column Widths

If you place your cursor carefully on the dividing line between two column headings, you’ll find that you can drag the divider line horizontally. Doing so makes the column to the left of your cursor wider or narrower.

What’s delightful about this activity is watching 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, “Wednesday, March 9, 2016, 2:22 PM” shrinks first to “Wed, Mar 9, 2016, 2:22 PM,” then to “3/9/16, 2:22 PM,” and finally to a terse “3/9/16.”

If you make a column too narrow, OS X shortens the file names 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 some other operating systems, would hide useful information, like the numbers 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 OS X.)

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

Tip

You don’t have to make the column mega-wide 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.

In fact, now you can move your mouse up or down a list over truncated file names, and their tooltip balloons appear instantaneously. (This trick works in list, column, or Cover Flow views—and in Save and Open dialog boxes, for that matter.)