Finder

List Applications and More
Mac Tip #349, 30 July 2008

A colleague recently mentioned he was making a list of all his software — his computer had been in the shop for repair and he felt he needed a backup list of software in case something else went wrong.

Such a list is a handy thing to have, so I thought I’d mention 3 separate ways you can easily compile a list like that. Note: I’m using Mac OS X 10.5.4, Leopard. It’s possible older versions of Mac OS X may behave differently.

Method 1: Copy and Paste

This is the easiest way. Open your Applications folder in the Finder. Select All (Command A, or Edit > Select All) and choose Copy (Command C or Edit > Copy). Now open a text document and choose Paste (Command V or Edit > Paste). A list of all your Applications appears.

Tweaks

• before the Copy and Paste operation sort the list by Name — the pasted list will also be alphabetical.
• also use the disclosure triangle to open the Utilities folder. Items from within that folder will appear within the pasted list.
• Use this technique on any folder that’s open in the Finder.

Note: you have a text editor on your Mac — look for TextEdit in the Applications folder.

Method 2: System Profiler

This is also very easy. Open Applications > Utilities > System Profiler. A window opens, displaying a list of Contents on the left. Select Software > Applications in that list. The right-hand pane displays a list of all your software, including version numbers.

Tweaks

Choose File > Save As from the System Profiler menu, and for File Format choose either Rich Text Format or Plain Text, then save the profile. Open the saved file with your text editor to see a full profile of your computer. Scroll down to find the Applications section.

Click the thumbnail images here for larger versions.

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Method 3: Command Line

This isn’t entirely hard, but it does require some finicky typing and a moment’s thought. Open Applications > Utilities > Terminal. A Terminal window opens showing a prompt that may say something like ‘Macintosh HD:~ yourname$ ‘. Mine says ‘pluto:~ miraz$ ‘ because my computer is named Pluto and my username on that machine is miraz.

Now you need to type a command that lists the files in the Applications folder and then saves it into a text file, perhaps in your Documents folder. Type the following exactly (including spaces), but replace ‘miraz‘ with your username:

ls /Applications > /Users/miraz/Documents/apps.txt

Then press the Return key.

It will seem as though nothing has happened, but look in your Documents folder where you should see a file called apps.txt. Open that file into your text editor and you will see a list of your Applications.

Tweaks

List the contents of any folder by changing the command above. Remember to replace ‘miraz’ with your username. This one lists the Applications > Utilities:

ls /Applications/Utilities > /Users/miraz/Documents/utilities.txt

This one lists the Documents folder:

ls /Users/miraz/Documents > /Users/miraz/Documents/docs.txt

Some explanation

ls - (ell ess) is a command to list things. It’s followed by a Space

/Users/miraz/Documents - refers to the user miraz’s Documents folder

> - is a command to save the information in a file. It has a Space in front and afterwards.

docs.txt - is the name for the file the command saves.

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Show Directories in Column View
Mac Tip #340, 28 May 2008

The strength of Column View is to show you a file or folder in its place amongst all your files and folders. Column View is mainly about relationships: this folder contains these folders which in turn contain these files.

My screenshot shows a Finder window with one file selected on the right, and all the files and folders around and ‘above’ it. It very clearly shows the hierarchy for a selected file.

To view columns go to the View menu in Finder and choose ‘as Columns’ or press Command 3. If you display the Toolbar on Finder windows, you can of course switch views with the Views buttons.

At the bottom of each column divider is a small ‘11′ — a pair of parallel vertical lines. Use these to resize the columns.

Drag or Option Drag

Drag the ‘11′ to right or left to make a single column wider or narrower. Hold down the Option key to affect all columns in the same way while you drag. In my screenshot I’ve made the leftmost column extremely wide.

Double click or Option Double click

Double click the ‘11′ to make the column an appropriate width for its contents. It may make it wider or narrower, depending on whether it was too narrow or too wide to begin with. Hold down the Option key while double clicking to set all columns to the same width at the same time. My screenshot shows the effect.

View Options

Columns are sorted by Name in alphabetical order, but call up the View Options window to change that. My screenshot shows the possibilities for sorting.

At the top of the View Options window is the name of the folder you have currently selected. In my screenshot you can see that in fact I have a file selected so the View Options window shows the name of the folder that contains the selected file.

Choose whether or not to always open that particular folder in Column View, and what size the text should be.

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Then come 3 checkboxes that interact to affect what you see. In the first of 3 screenshots I’ve selected to not show any icons at all. The name of each file or folder has no icon to the left of it.

In the second screenshot of the series I have elected to show the icons but not the icon preview. The icons to the left of each name are generic. I have also chosen to show the Preview column. In the column to the right of the selection is a preview of the selected item, together with detailed information about the file.

The final screenshot shows the icon previews: the icon to the left of each filename is representative of the contents or nature of the file or folder.

List view and Icon view, as explained in previous Tips, both show you all the files contained in a single folder. Column View reveals the relationships between files.

In the next Tip we explore Cover Flow View.

Column View the movie

I’m still experimenting with making movies and would love to get your feedback.

View the larger Column View Tips movie - large (23 Mb, .mov file) or the smaller Column View Tips movie - small (12 Mb, .mov file). Note: give it time to load — it will play eventually.

Alternatively, download the Column View Tips Movie (zipped, 20 Mb). After it’s downloaded to your machine, double click it to expand the zipped file and then double click the movie to play it.

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Show Information in Finder List View
Mac Tip #339, 21 May 2008

List View

My screenshot shows a Finder window containing various folders, with one folder’s contents also listed. I chose to view these as a list. To view a list go to the View menu in Finder and choose ‘as List’ or press Command 2. If you display the Toolbar on Finder windows, you can of course switch views with the Views buttons.

I have my Listed files sorted by Name in alphabetical order. To reverse the order I could click on the column header — in this case Name. Sort any column by clicking on its header. Click again to reverse the order.

The name column is always displayed, and always on the left, but drag any other column by its header to move it to a new position. In my second screenshot I’ve changed the order of the columns around and sorted by Date Modified, with the newest items at the top.

To display more columns and more information go the Finder’s View menu: Show View Options (Command J). It offers several options that are different from those for Icon View. My third screenshot shows a Finder window with all options turned on and the View Options window obscuring some of the information.

In my screenshot you can see that I chose for this folder window to always open in List view, with small icons, and 10 point text — that was really only so I could fit everything into the screenshot.

I set all columns to display. Note, for example, that the VersionTracker Downloads folder was created on 3 November 2006, but modified ‘today’, when I saved new files inside it.

The size of all items (in Megabytes) is displayed, and for software a Version number is available. Where I’ve labelled an item the colour is displayed as a background behind the row of information, but also the name of the label is displayed.

While I don’t bother changing the label names, some people use them for words like ‘important’, ‘urgent’, ‘backups’ and so on. One of the most ancient MacTips (Change the label name, Mac Tip #12/18-July-2001) explained briefly how to do this for Mac OS 9. The movie it refers to no longer exists though, and the instructions are a little different from Mac OS X. I’ll write up new instructions in a future Tip.

Relative dates uses words like ‘today’ and ‘yesterday’ until files are a bit older. This makes it easy to spot recently changed or downloaded files in a list.

Note the handy information in the Comments column for images I’ve created myself: Mac OS X creates an HTML tag that authors can just drop into any web page.

For those who don’t like clutter, my final screenshot shows a Finder window with all columns turned off, large icons and large text. Really, you can customise that Finder window to be just how you like it.

But wait, there’s more… Yet to come: Column View and Cover Flow.

Update: I’ve been experimenting with making a movie and would love to get your feedback.

View the List View Tips movie (13 Mb, .mov file). Note: give it time to load — it will play eventually.

Note: this is an experimental movie, made with a demo version of ScreenFlow, so it has the words ScreenFlow Demo emblazoned across it. If you all respond well to this concept I’ll pay up for the software and be able to remove that banner. Please leave helpful comments below.

Alternatively, download the List View Tips Movie (zipped, 10.6 Mb). After it’s downloaded to your machine, double click it to expand the zipped file and then double click the movie to play it.

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