It is now possible to share a folder very easily in Leopard. Right or control-click, and choose Get Info from the contextual menu (or just press Command-I). In the dialog, there's a new checkbox called "Shared Folder" If you check this, the folder and its contents are instantly shared.

[robg adds: You'll still need to set up user access for this folder, using either the Sharing & Permissions section of the Get Info window, or the File Sharing section of the Sharing System Preferences panel.]

This hint lets you open several items in a stack in one go, instead of having to open the stack several times.

After clicking on a stack so that it fans or grids out, hold the Option key down, and then click on as many items as you desire within the stack. As you click each, it will open and the stack will remain onscreen. Unfortunately (at least when selecting folders), items will open behind what ever program you happen to be working in at the time.

The Space Bar is a very convenient way to trigger Quick Look in the Leopard Finder. However, if you're trying to select items whose names begin with a space, the Quick Look window will appear and eat your subsequent keystrokes.

To select the first item that begins with a space without triggering Quick Look, hold down the Option key while you press the Space Bar. You only need to do this once; once you've started to type-select, you can use the space bar unmodified.

Type-selection can also interfere with Quick Look. To use Quick Look after type-selecting, wait a moment before pressing the Space Bar, or just press Command-Y immediately.

I love Quick Look. Especially with images. Go to an image (I've tested JPGs and PSDs so far), and hit the Space Bar. A large version shows up like it's supposed to.

Now, hold down the Option key and click somewhere on the Quick Look image -- it zooms in! Hold Shift-Option, click, and it'll zoom out. When zoomed in, release all keys and click and drag -- you can move within the zoomed image. That, my friends, is greatness.

With my unscientific testing, the zoomed in Quick Look image has just a hair less clarity compared to the same image zoomed in using a graphics program -- but nothing to gripe about!

[robg adds: You can also zoom in and out by holding Option and using the scroll wheel on your mouse, or two-finger scrolling on a trackpad. This technique was mentioned in the comments to this hint on zooming PDFs, but the above adds more details.]

You can activate Quick Look with multiple documents chosen in your Finder. The Quick Look window will open with the document chosen first, but you can navigate through all of the selected items with the with the left and right arrow keys.

Especially useful is the index sheet, accessible in Quick Look's toolbar, which displays thumbnails of all selected documents. This is most handy when looking at pictures, but also serves well with other file types. It works well with all the file types supported by Quick Look you have chosen.

Also, activating Full Screen mode in Quicklook with only two items selected, and subsequently choosing the grid, is a useful way of looking at non-Quick Look-compatible items' full resolution icons.

10.5 ships with uppercase menu items in the Finder's sidebar, similar to recent versions of iTunes. To make things lowercase like they should be, do the following. First, navigate to (or copy and paste the following into the Go » Go to Folder dialog):


Duplicate the file called LocalizableCore.strings, and keep the duplicate as a backup. Open the original with Xcode or a text editor, then edit lines 50 to 53 to make them lowercase:

"SD5" = "Devices";
"SD6" = "Shared";
"SD7" = "Search for";
"SD8" = "Places";

Save the file (entering your admin password if asked) and log out and back in or open Terminal and type killall Finder to relaunch the Finder and see your changes.

[robg adds: This hint explains how to do the same for iTunes.]

When using Quick Look on a PDF (and, as best as I can tell, only PDFs), you can zoom in (Command-equals) and out (Command-minus) -- just like in Photoshop. Nice!

Leopard changes the way files are named when duplicated via Optiond-drag (which appends numerical increments) and Command-D (which appends copy first, then numerical increments). To elaborate:

Duplicating a file using Command-D or the menu File » Duplicate will append copy to the filename; if it already ends with copy, then the next available number greater than 1 is used. Here are some examples of Command-D behaviors:

• myfile.txt creates myfile copy.txt
• myfile copy.txt creates myfile copy 2.txt. Repeating the command again on myfile.txt creates myfile copy 3.txt, etc.
• 1.txt creates 1 copy.txt

Option-dragging a file in the same folder will append the next available number, greater than 1, to the file name (even on numerical filenames). Some examples of option-dragging behaviors:

• myfile.txt creates myfile 2.txt; option-dragging it again creates myfile 3.txt. If you then option-drag myfile copy 2.txt, OS X creates myfile copy 4.txt (because copy 2 and 3 exist)
• list 58.txt creates list 59.txt
• 6.txt results in 6 2.txt

[robg adds: I realized the behavior had changed, but I hadn't bothered to figure out exactly how.]

If you've enabled the Path Bar (View » Show Path Bar), you can do more than just click it to jump to a given spot in the hierarchy. Try a control-click on any entry in the path display, and you'll get a pop-up menu allowing you to open the selected item, open its enclosing folder, or open a Get Info window. This makes the Path Bar a lot more functional.

[robg adds: Some may consider this obvious, but I'd never thought about control-clicking on it, so I figure a few others may have missed it as well.]

It is possible to dramatically increase the Finder's icon size, beyond the official 128x128 pixels. I tried it for the Desktop with the following command in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.finder DesktopViewOptions -dict IconSize -integer 256; killall Finder

You can use any value you want, up to a maximum of 512. Warning! You might see some slowdowns on older machines, at least in OS X 10.5. This is due to the fact that drawing the high-resolution 512x512 icons seems to be hard work for some graphic cards and/or G4 processors.

[robg adds: We actually ran this hint a longgg time ago. However, back then it referenced an article on MacAddict's site, which has since vanished. I thought this would be a good chance to update the hint, especially with 10.5's amazing new 512x512 icons (though you can do this in any version of OS X after the public beta). Click the image at right to get the full-size effect: the icons as seen at 512x512 on a 1280x1024 screen. I am not suggesting that this is a usable size, of course!]