Faster navigation in Finder and Open/Save dialogs
Everybody uses Finder, the file browsing application of Mac OS X, a lot. Let’s look at some handy shortcuts to speed navigation up a little.
Go menu
What’s there?
The Go menu allows you to jump to a couple of the major directories, such as your home folder, the applications directory or the Desktop.
You see the shortcuts for each item listed next to it. So pressing these, will let you jump to the respective directory.
What you see are the symbols for they shift key: 
and the command key: 
plus a letter you have to press on your keyboard. Read this post on everything related to the modifier keys (such as shift or command) on your Mac keyboard.
Open/Save dialogs
Here is what’s really handy: These shortcuts work in any open/save dialog, too. So, for example, whenever you quickly want to save a file to the Desktop for later reference, press shift-command-D right in the save file dialog to jump to the Desktop.
View menu / toolbar icons
What’s there?
Each Finder view (Icons, List, Columns, Cover Flow) shows different information and has its special purpose.
Access them via the View menu in Finder or use the icons in Finder’s toolbar.
A quick overview on what the different view are good for:
- Icon view is good to quickly identify an item by looking at their preview.
- List view comes in handy if you want to see additional file attributes (such as file size or creation date) at a glance.
- Column view is a way to see a lot of files and folders at once and quickly navigate folders hierarchies up and down (by pressing the left and right arrow keys)
- Cover Flow view is a nice addition to view your files, but it’s only useful if you need a graphic representation of your files in order to be able to distinguish them, such as in a visual web history.
How to use them?
As you change from one view to another, your selection stays the same. So a workflow to copy some pictures from one location to another one, could look like this:
- Go to icon view / Cover Flow mode to decide which pictures to use (by looking at their icon thumbnail).
- Go to list view mode to see additional information on each picture and maybe deselect some.
- Copy the pictures (command-C).
- Go to column view mode to quickly navigate to another directory so you can paste the pictures there (command-V).
You see, changing the views on the fly might be an important part of a workflow. Read this post on how to select items in Mac OS X.
Customize each view
Each view has different options to customize it. To see what’s available for each view, from the View menu choose Show View Options.
As you choose a different view, the content of the window, showing the options will change. Good news: This window stays on top of all Finder windows, so you can change the view in the background - the content of the View Options window is updated automatically according to the selected view.
Additionally, in the View options window, you can decide that one particular folder should always open in a specific view (say, you always want to open your home folder in Icon view).
Shortcuts
The shortcuts for each view are displayed just next to each item in the menu:
command-1 for icon view,
command-2 for list view,
command-3 for column view and
command-4 for Cover Flow view.
Open/Save dialogs
In open/save dialog, these shortcuts work as well (except for Cover Flow). Using keyboard shortcuts might work faster for you as clicking the icons in the open/save dialog to change how things are displayed.
One last thing
Don’t forget about Quick Look, which works in every Finder view. Simply press the space bar on your keyboard to display a preview of the file without having to open it in an application.
Also keep in mind, that the QuickLook window is a representation of what’s currently selected in Finder, so use the arrow keys or the mouse to select a different item in Finder to update the QuickLook window as you go through your files.
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Tags: Desktop, finder, keyboard shortcuts, preview, QuickLook
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