OS X Yosemite: The Missing Manual

The Trash

No single element of the Macintosh interface is as recognizable or famous as the Trash can icon, which appears at the end of the Dock. (It’s actually a wastebasket, not a can. And in Yosemite, it’s made of white plastic instead of wire. This is progress?)

You can discard almost any icon by dragging it into the Trash can. When the tip of your arrow cursor touches the Trash icon, the little wastebasket turns black. When you release the mouse, you’re well on your way to discarding whatever it was you dragged. As a convenience, OS X even replaces the empty-wastebasket icon with a wastebasket-filled-with-crumpled-up-papers icon, to let you know there’s something in there.

GEM IN THE ROUGH: Opening Things in the Trash

Now and then, it’s very useful to see what some document in the Trash is before committing it to oblivion—and the only way to do that is to open it.

Trouble is, you can’t open it by double-clicking; you’ll get nothing but an error message.

Or at least that’s what Apple wants you to think.

First of all, you can use Quick Look (Quick Look) to inspect something in the Trash.

But if Quick Look can’t open the file—or if you want to edit it instead of just reading it—then drag the document onto the icon of a program that can open it. That is, if a file called Don’t Read Me.txt is in the Trash, you can drag it onto, say, the Word or TextEdit icon in your Dock.

The document dutifully pops open on the screen. Inspect, close, and then empty the Trash (or rescue the document).

It’s ...