Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Lion Edition

Selecting Icons

To highlight a single icon in preparation for printing, opening, duplicating, or deleting, click the icon once. Both the icon and the name darken in a uniquely Lionish way.

Tip

You can change the color of the oval highlighting that appears around the name of a selected icon. Choose →System Preferences, click Appearance, and use the Highlight Color pop-up menu.

That much may seem obvious. But lots of people have no idea how to manipulate more than one icon at a time—an essential survival skill. These techniques are essentially the same as in Windows, except that the keys you hold down are different.

Selecting by Clicking

To highlight multiple files in preparation for moving or copying, use one of these techniques:

• To highlight all the icons. To select all the icons in a window, press -A (the equivalent of the Edit→Select All command).

• To highlight several icons by dragging. You can drag diagonally to highlight a group of nearby icons, as shown in Figure 3-2. In a list view, in fact, you don’t even have to drag over the icons themselves—your cursor can touch any part of any file’s row, like its modification date or file size.

  

  Figure 3-2. You can highlight several icons simultaneously ...