I’m not content with how Finder and related Mac software opens folders. For example, I want to attach a document for work, but the program opens up a personal folder full of stuff I would not want to touch by accident. Hence, the following questions:
Can I just make Finder not so smart? Can’t I just have it always browse at the top level instead of seemingly random folders (i.e., what I pulled a doc from last week)?
Can I encode a folder so that it is never opened in that way?
For that matter, can I password-lock a folder?
Bonus Question: Can I turn off autofill globally in Mac? It is more trouble than it is worth. Thanks!
Your first question is confusing. Do you mean what folder gets displayed when you use the “Open” command from an application? Or when you open a new Finder window?
2 & 3. If you’re using MacOS X, you can use the Disk Utility application to create a disk image of a folder. When you create the image, you can specify a password that must be entered before the image is unlocked and available. Once it’s unlocked, you can treat it like any other disk device and read/write/copy/delete files as desired.
I agree with rjung that the OP isn’t at all clear, but my best parse of it is that the OP is complaining that the navigation-services “open what?” dialog rebounds to the last place navigated to (i.e., “what I pulled a doc from last week”). Aeschines would prefer (for some unaccountable reason) that the dialog start off at the desktop level, the home-folder (~/) level, or the root level instead.
Is that accurate, Aeschines?
OK, forgive me for being opaque, but why for the love of dogcows would you want it to do that for?
I mean, let’s say you have a folder of current business spreadsheets and you’re opening each one to look at the data and see if it’s current and then print it. You go Command-O and you navigate to the folder you want, select the document you want to start with, and open it. Do your stuff, close document saving changes. You go Command-O to open the next document. I’d think that what anyone would want, behavior-wise, would be that it opens to the same folder you were just in, with the document you last opened highlighted so you hit downarrow to go to the next document and so on. If what you actually wanted to do next was open some document in some unrelated location, a quick Command-D takes you to the desktop, so why would you want it to always open to the Desktop to start with, so that you’d have to start over and drill down to the same folder over and over again in the first scenario?
[/being unhelpful]
If you want fine-grained control, e.g., “I want iTunes to always open to this folder, but I want Photoshop to always open to this other folder, and Excel should open to this one here”, you can set it up with DefaultFolder. I can’t seriously imagine running MacOS without DefaultFolder, but once I’ve launched an app and opened one file I still want it to rebound to the last file I opened when I next go to open a file. (There’s a keystroke that will switch me to that application’s default folder if I don’t want to open a second document from that folder). However, you can set it up to behave the way you’ve described and have it always rebound to the default folder (there’s a menu of recently visited folders so if you did set it up that way you could use the menu to go back to the most recently visited folder if you did want to open a second document from the same folder).
Here’s an example of what I mean, just experienced. I’m working on a file for work. I want to rename it. The program then opens up NOT the folder in which the file I’m working on is in, but the last folder I opened in MS Word. That is, in this case, useless.
I hate to say it, but Windows does a better, more intuitive job with this. If you rename and resave a file, it gives you that file’s folder as your choice. And does similar things better than Mac. Not all, but most.
Mac is supposed to be “smarter.” In many ways it is, but in many ways it fails compared to Windows.
I’m really not understanding the problem either. This doesn’t look like a case of Windows or Mac doing something “better”. It looks like a case of “I’m used to it working one way under Windows, but it works a different way under Mac OS.” The Mac system doesn’t give me any trouble at all, but then it’s what I’m used to. I would get really frustrated if I had to start at the root level every time I saved a file.
You haven’t answered any questions and it isn’t clear how you launched the file you say you’re workinogt on for work. Did you double-click the file after double-clicking your hard drive, double-clicking the folder, and so on until you were staring at the file itself? Did you, instead, launch the program, then go to the File menu, select the Open command, then navigate via the “Open File” dialog to the location of the file, select it, and hit the “Open” button? How’d you get the damn file open in the first place?
And what do you MEAN the
– ?? Programs don’t open up folders. Programs *go to * folders when you go “file / open”, perhaps but they don’t open folders. Unless you have Default Folder installed in which case they can.
Are you referring to where the program opens TO when you go File, open? If so, you can’t change the name of a file from that dialog anyhow (unless, again, you have Default Folder installed, in which case you can). All you can do from that dialog is open the file, not rename it.
If, on the other hand, you double-clicked your way through your hard disk’s folder structure until you were staring dead-on at the file and then double-clicked the file to work on it, and now you want to rename it, go to the Finder, hide the application you’re in so it’s out of your way and hey, there’s your file, large as life and twice as ugly, just click on it and rename it.
Did I mention that you really ought to install Default Folder? Everyone should. (Except PC users who should install FileBox Extender instead as the closest approximation).
One option for your stuff you would not want to touch by accident is to set up a new account on your computer just for such stuff. To create a new account, go to System Preferences, Accounts, and “New User” (you may need to click the lock icon in the lower-left and enter your password to be allowed to do this). After you’ve created the new account (you can give it the same password as your regular account, if you’d like) and moved everything into it that belongs there, log into it and right-click that account’s home directory, and select “get info”. From there, you can set everything in it to be accessible only when logged in as that user, so (as long as you log out from that account after you’re done using it) you can never accidentally open any of it.
Also, OSX 10.4 (without any add-ons) does seem to keep separate default folders for different applications. Other recently-used folders (regardless of application) will appear prominently on the drop-down list, though. But folders used on one account will have no effect at all on other accounts.
I doubled-clicked on a translation file in Finder and began working on it in Word. Then I used Finder to locate a poetry file and worked on it. Then, I worked some more on the translation. I hit “Save As” and it opened up the folder the poetry file had been in, since that’s the last folder I had “dealt with” (ie, opened a file from).
In contrast, had I been using Windows, when I hit “Save As” for the translation file it would have opened the folder the translation was in.
I aver that this is not just a matter of what is useful, but that Windows’ method is superior because it tends to maintain a chain between related files.
It’s too bad that Mac requires extra software to work to your satisfaction in this area; I think Windows’ system is fine as it is. And I’m not trying to be snotty, and I do appreciate your answer. But I also find this aspect of Mac very frustrating. Thanks.
Not that it helps, but this isn’t a Mac thing, as other apps behave in the manner that you want. In both BBEdit and Apple’s own TextEdit, for example, the Save As dialogue for each file opens on the folder in which that file is already saved. MS Office apps however, appear to open the Save As dialogue in whichever folder was last accessed by that app rather than the the folder in which the currently active file is currently located. As with many things in life, this is another problem you’re going to have to blame on Microsoft…
It does strike me as odd behavior. I don’t know if it’s a Word-specific behavior or not, not being a Word user.
Point taken, acknowledged. I could counter with parallels in the Windows universe but that doesn’t make your point any less valid, and besides you’re genuinely onto something. One of the few areas where Windows really is superior to the Mac is within the “Save / Save As / Open File” dialogs. Under Windows, in the process of rooting around for a file to open, you can rename an existing file, move it elsewhere, or delete it. The MacOS has never natively provided that functionality. In the early days of MacOS X, you couldn’t even type the name of the file or folder you wanted and have it highlight! (It was a big big issue for those of us who were OS 9 users booting into X for the first time). Over time, these dialogs have improved markedly under OS X but they are still a weak point in OS X’s interface design. There is some suckitude there.
Now I"m suggesting something you can do about it. It will make your life under OS X a lot more pleasant.
I don’t work for St. Clair Software or have stock in them or anything
