FolderGlance - A contextual menu drill-down tool

Dec 05, '05 07:17:00AM

Contributed by: robg

FolderGlance imageThe macosxhints Rating:
9 of 10
[Score: 9 out of 10]

Every so often, a little utility comes along and instantly makes me wonder "how the heck did I get along without this one before?" FolderGlance is just such a utility. It's a contextual menu that lets you, among other things, drill down into the currently selected folder in the Finder. Why might this be useful? Well, for one, it's a lot faster than using even column view with multiple clicks; it's just one ever-expanding drill-down menu. But two, and of more interest to me, is that it will drill into bundles just as readily as it will folders. So instead of getting a new window open to Contents every time I use 'Show Package Contents," I can simply navigate to my final destination directly from the contextual menu (click picture for larger version):



Once you've reached your destination, you can do quite a bit. Open a file within the folder, move it, copy it, make an alias of it. You can even 'pick up' the selected item, so that you can drag it to another location. Very slick. You can even add your own folders to the FolderGlance menu, and these will appear as their own entries in the contextual menu -- this is a fast way of navigating into often-visited directories.

The prefs (FolderGlance has a preference pane front end) have other settings, as well. You can specify which files to include, how to sort at the top level (by kind or alpha), how to sort within kind, whether or not to always show package contents, and much more. There's even an option to reduce the font size for the contextual menu itself (the whole thing, not just FolderGlance's portion).

The only thing I wish FolderGlance could do that it won't is to open the chosen folder in my current Finder window; it pops up a new one, as would happen with Show Package Contents. But that's a minor quibble. Given how often I look inside bundles for my work with hints, FolderGlance is a big timesaver!

Comments (15)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20051205071736666