Skip to Content
Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Lion Edition
book

Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Lion Edition

by David Pogue
March 2012
Beginner
710 pages
28h 34m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Lion Edition

Get Info

By clicking an icon and then choosing File→Get Info, you open an important window like the one shown in Figure 3-8. It’s a collapsible, multipanel screen that provides a wealth of information about a highlighted icon. In essence, this is the Properties window for the 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 disk icon, you get statistics about its capacity and how much of it is full.

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

  • If you highlight so many icons simultaneously that their Get Info windows would overwhelm your screen, Mac OS X thoughtfully tallies up their information into a single summary window. It shows you how many icons you highlighted, breaks them down by type (“23 documents, 3 folders,” for example), and adds up the total of their file sizes. That’s a great opportunity to change certain file characteristics on numerous files simultaneously, such as locking or unlocking them, hiding or showing their file name suffixes, changing their ownership or permissions (Figure 14-5), and so on.

Top: The Get Info window can be as small as this, with all its information panes collapsed.Bottom: Or, if you click each flippy triangle to open its corresponding panel of information, it can be as huge as this—shown here split in two because this box isn’t 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 out to buy a really gigantic monitor.There’s a secret command called Get Summary Info. Highlight a group of icons, press Control--I, and marvel at the special Get Info box that tallies up their sizes and other characteristics.

Figure 3-8. Top: The Get Info window can be as small as this, with all its ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Mountain Lion Edition

Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Mountain Lion Edition

David Pogue

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449333836Errata Page