How cluttered is your desktop? Your real desktop. Where do you store the files you’re working on right now and the ones you haven’t touched this year or even last? On your Mac, how much do you interact with the Finder?

In Desktop Reflection and I Spy, I shared several ways to declutter your digital Desktop and potentially speed up your computer. And in Mac Interface Basics, I introduced the Finder and identified a few benefits of organizing files on your Mac.

Now it’s time to explore the Finder in greater depth and share some tips to support your productivity and storage habits—and forever wonder why we always precede this application with a definite article.

A Window to Your Workspace

When you log into your Mac, the Finder is the first application to open. It’s always there in the background, passively managing your files, giving access to the folders where you store them, and providing the interface with which you open, save, rename, and reorganize them.

A Finder window may be foreign territory, though, to folks who store all their documents on the Desktop. A window is the most basic article of the Finder and that’s why the first command in the Finder’s File menu is New Finder Window — with keyboard shortcut Command+N. (It even precedes New Folder!)

Sure, when you open a folder anywhere, its contents appear in a Finder window, but how often do you start by making a window and then navigating to where your stuff is located?

What Can You See and Do?

Click the Finder icon on the Dock and check out what you can see in a Finder window. You have a lot of flexibility to configure the window contents with commands in the View menu and the View Options panel, as well as a number of choices in Finder Preferences. I especially recommend keeping folders on top in windows when sorting by name.

The Finder also manages the Trash (at the other end of the Dock), whose contents open in a Finder window and whose Empty command is in the Finder’s application menu.

Also, in the Finder, you can jump to common folders using commands in the Go menu, create empty folders or ones containing selected items via the File menu, and you can easily rename files and folders simply by pressing Return, renaming, and pressing Return again.

Hot Finder Tricks

You can control which applications open specific kinds of files, such as if you want PDFs to open with Preview instead of Acrobat Reader:

  1. Select a file
  2. Choose File > Get Info (Command+I)
  3. Use the Open With section to choose the desired app
  4. To make the change stick for all files of this type, click Change All…

Copy or move an item from one place to another with keyboard shortcuts instead of drag-and-drop:

  1. Select one or more items
  2. Choose Edit > Copy (Command+C)
  3. Navigate to the destination
  4. To paste a copy, simply use Edit > Paste (Command+V) as usual; to move the item, hold the Option key and choose Edit > Move Item Here (Command+Option+V)

To get info on multiple files in aggregate, such as to find out their total size, use the Inspector: Hold Option and choose File > Show Inspector (Command+Option+I). The Inspector is a type of Info window whose details change dynamically depending on what is selected.

Now that you’re more familiar with the Finder, we’ll start exploring the rest of your data and where you create and arrange them. Next week, I’ll focus on applications, both those you keep in the Dock and the rest, and processes of installing and deleting.

The following week will differentiate between folders in the Finder where we store documents and mailboxes in Mail where we organize email messages. The last week of May will feature a discussion of a variety of applications we may use for taking notes.

What are you excited to learn this month?