Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Mavericks Edition

Finder Tabs

The world discovered the miracle of tabs in Web browsers years ago. Here’s a simple software design idea, modeled after the tabs of file folders, that lets you keep many Web pages open at once in a single window. What a convenience! What cleanliness!

But it took until 2013 for someone to realize that tabs might be useful at the desktop, too. And it’s true: Mavericks offers tabs in Finder windows.

They do exactly the same job they do in a browser: They let you keep open the windows of several different containers—folders or disks—in a single window frame. That makes it easy to move icons back and forth between them (Figure 2-19), or even to view the same window twice in different views.

As a convenience, Apple designed the commands, keystrokes, and clicks to work exactly as they do in Safari, OS X’s Web browser.

Figure 2-19. Finder tabs are exactly like tabs in a Web browser window. They let you view multiple folders or the contents of disks in a single window, which conserves space beautifully. Bonus tip: If you drag a file onto a new tab (like Desktop, shown here) and let go, you’ve moved that icon into that new location. But if you move it onto the Desktop tab and pause with your finger still down, the Desktop tab springs open so that you can continue your drag into a folder you find there.

Creating Tabs

There are almost as many ways to open new tabs as there are people.