OS X Mountain Lion: The Missing Manual

Windows and How to Work Them

In designing OS X, one of Apple’s key goals was to address the window-proliferation problem. As you create more files, stash them in more folders, and launch more programs, it’s easy to wind up paralyzed before a screen awash with overlapping rectangles.

That’s the problem admirably addressed by Mission Control, described in detail on Mission Control: Death to Window Clutter. Some handy clutter and navigation controls are built into the windows themselves, too. For example:

The Sidebar

The Sidebar (Figure 1-3) is the pane at the left side of every Finder window, unless you’ve hidden it. (It’s also at the left side of every Open dialog box and every full-sized Save dialog box.)

The Sidebar has as many as three sections, each preceded by a collapsible heading.

Note

The little flippy triangles that could collapse (hide) each Sidebar heading are gone. Instead, if you point to a heading without clicking, a tiny Hide or Show button appears. Click it to collapse or expand that heading’s contents.

Here are the headings you’ll soon know and love. (New in Mountain Lion: You can drag these headings up and down in the Sidebar to rearrange them.)

• Favorites. This primary section of the Sidebar is the place to stash things for easy access. You can stock this list with the icons of disks, files, programs, folders, and the virtual, self-updating folders called saved searches.

  Each icon is a shortcut. For example, click the Applications icon to view the contents of your Applications ...