10.5: How to select and close folders quickly in list view

Nov 05, '07 07:30:09AM

Contributed by: TvE

I just noticed that -- finally as of 10.5 -- Mac OS X's Finder is a lot more useful for us keyboard shortcut fanatics: You can now close folders with the left arrow without having the focus on the folder to be closed. Put another way, it's now possible to close a folder while having focus on one of the files within that folder.

For example, assume you have focus (in list view mode, of course) on a file named ASCIIMoviePlayer on this path: /Users » tve » TMP » ASCIIMoviePlayerSample. In 10.4, if you wanted to close all of the opened folders (one at a time), you'd have to use a combination of Up Arrow and Left Arrow to move back up the hierarchy while close parent folders. But in 10.5, the first press of the Left Arrow takes you to the focused item's enclosing folder, and the second press closes that folder. So in the above example, you can get to the root level of the disk by hitting left arrow quickly 10 times in a row -- note that's just a theoretical example; I'd probably just hit Command-Shift-C in this case!

Probably not a popular statement, but OS X finally works as well as Windows, which has been doing it correctly for years. (I have not been using list view on Apple hardware since 9.2.2, due to this problem. PS.: ASCIIMoviePlayer is a huge entertaining piece of software.

[robg adds: The 10.5 behavior in list view mode is a huge timesaver; I only use list views on a few key windows, but this change makes it much easier to use those windows. BTW, we covered ASCIIMoviePlayer in this older hint.]

Comments (9)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20071027112932704