Finder Preferences
Mac Tip#79/20-Nov-2002
The Finder is a piece of software which is always running on your Mac. It’s what you get when you start up your computer and before you click on Eudora or Internet Explorer or AppleWorks or whatever else you might normally use.
The Finder is the place where you can Find things — you can see all your documents and folders, you can call up Find or Sherlock and search for documents and other files on your own computer.
Pretty well any software you use has settings you can change. These settings are usually called Preferences (or Prefs for short). In your email software, for example, you can change settings such as how often it should check for mail, or how large the text should be on screen.
Many people don’t know that the Finder also has Preferences. Under Mac OS 9 (and earlier) and Mac OS X there are slight differences in what you can set. There might also be some variation within different versions of OS X — this Tip refers to 10.2.2.
First make sure that you are in the Finder. Under OS X click on the Finder icon in the Dock (when you hover the mouse over the various icons a tooltip is displayed with the name of the program or document). Under OS 9 go to the Application Switcher in the top right corner of the screen and choose Finder from the list of items.
Next go to the Finder menu or the Edit menu and choose Preferences.
Under OS 10.2.2 you can now choose such settings as whether to open folders into a new window, how long a delay to set on spring-loaded windows, whether to show CDs and the like on the desktop and which languages your computer should pay attention to when indexing your hard drive.
Under OS 9 the Finder Preferences cover such topics as setting a Simple Finder (this might be of use for 5-year olds but I suggest not switching on this setting as you’ll suddenly be unable to do the most basic things), how large icons should be, how long a delay to set on spring-loaded windows, and what colours and names labels should use.
If you’ve never explored these settings before then you should take a look.
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is jointly authored by Miraz Jordan and Maria Langer.
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