Mac: how to use Finder without touching the mouse much

Most guides on Mac how to use Finder stop at opening a window and clicking around the sidebar. That is not where the time goes. The time goes into repeating the same four or five moves hundreds of times a day: getting to a folder, comparing what is in it, taking a subset somewhere else, and handing that subset to another application. Finder has settings and shortcuts for all of it, and the defaults are tuned for a first session rather than for a hundredth one.

This walks through the parts that change how fast the window is to operate: choosing a view for the question being asked, the settings that are stored per folder rather than globally, the rules that decide whether a drag copies or moves, and the keys that remove most of the pointing.

Choose the view for the question, not for the folder

There are four views, and each answers a different question. Switching between them costs one keystroke, so the useful habit is switching often rather than picking a favourite.

View	Shortcut	Answers
Icon	Command+1	Which one is it, when the file looks distinctive
List	Command+2	Which is newest, largest, or oldest
Column	Command+3	Where does this sit, and what else is at each level
Gallery	Command+4	What is inside, one item at a time

Column view is the one that repays the most attention. Each column is a level of the hierarchy, the arrow keys walk left and right through those levels, and typing the first letters of a name jumps to it. Navigating four levels deep and back takes no clicks at all, and the path stays visible the whole time, which removes the usual question of where the window ended up.

List view is the only one that sorts on a value. Clicking a column header sorts by it, clicking again reverses, and holding Option while clicking the disclosure triangle of a folder expands every folder inside it at once. That combination answers "what changed in this tree yesterday" faster than search does.

Gallery view renders a large preview of whatever is selected, which is exactly what is wanted for photographs and exactly what is not wanted in a folder of video files, where each selection change starts a new render.

Sorting and grouping are separate controls

Two controls in the View menu look similar and behave differently, and mixing them up is the usual reason a window will not sort the way it is told.

Sort By orders the items. Group By splits them into labelled sections first, then sorts inside each section. When a window is grouped by kind, clicking the Date Modified header no longer produces a single ordered list, because the grouping wins and the sort applies within each group. Setting Group By back to None restores a plain ordered list.

In icon view there is a third state. Arranging by a value snaps icons into position and prevents dragging them anywhere else, which is helpful on a shared folder and frustrating on a desktop where positions carry meaning. The setting to keep folders above files regardless of the sort lives in Finder Settings under Advanced.

The settings that are stored per folder

Show View Options, opened with Command+J, is the least obvious part of Finder, because most of what it contains applies only to the folder currently open. That is why a change made in one place seems to be forgotten everywhere else.

The panel holds the icon size, grid spacing, text size, which columns are shown in list view, whether folder sizes are calculated, and the background of the window. At the bottom is a button that applies the current settings as the default for all windows in that view. Without pressing it, the changes stay attached to the one folder.

Two other per folder settings sit at the top of the same panel. The first forces a folder to open in a particular view every time, which is worth setting on a photo folder that should always be gallery, or a project root that should always be column. The second, Browse in this view, extends that choice to everything opened underneath it.

A folder that keeps reverting to a view you did not choose almost always has one of those two boxes ticked. Untick it, set the view, and the window will follow the global default again.

Drag rules: what copies, what moves, what leaves a pointer

Dragging in Finder does different things depending on where the destination is, which is the source of most accidental duplicates.

Action	Same disk	Different disk
Plain drag	Moves	Copies
Command and drag	Moves	Moves
Option and drag	Copies	Copies
Option, Command and drag	Makes an alias	Makes an alias

Move files to a different disk: Press and hold the Command key, then drag the files to the disk. Source: support.apple.com

There is a keyboard equivalent that avoids dragging altogether, and it is missing from the Edit menu until a modifier is held. Copy the item with Command+C, go to the destination, then hold Option: the Paste Item entry changes to Move Item Here, with the shortcut Option+Command+V. The original is removed only after the move completes.

Spring loading is the other half of dragging. Holding a dragged item over a folder opens that folder after a short delay, and continuing to hold over the next one keeps descending, so a file can be dropped several levels down in one gesture. Pressing the space bar during the drag opens the folder immediately instead of waiting. The delay is adjustable in Finder Settings under General.

The title bar is a control, not a label

The small icon to the left of the folder name in the title bar represents the folder itself, and it can be dragged anywhere a folder can go. Dropping it into a Terminal window pastes the path. Dropping it into an upload field attaches the folder. Dropping it into another Finder window moves the whole folder, following the same modifier rules as any other drag.

Holding Command and clicking the title opens a menu of every enclosing folder up to the disk, and choosing one jumps there. That single click replaces the path bar for people who only need the hierarchy occasionally, and it works even when the path bar is hidden.

Two more grouping moves live near the same area. Selecting several items and choosing New Folder with Selection from the shortcut menu creates a folder and puts them inside in one step, named and ready to rename. Holding Option while dragging a folder onto another folder with the same name offers to merge them rather than replace, though the merge option only appears when one side holds items the other does not.

Operating the window from the keyboard

Nearly every routine action has a key, and the set worth learning is small.

• Type the first letters of a name to jump to it in any view.
• Command+Down opens the selection, Command+Up goes to the enclosing folder.
• Return starts renaming rather than opening, which surprises people arriving from other systems.
• Command+Delete moves the selection to the Trash. The Delete key alone does nothing.
• Space opens Quick Look, and the arrow keys move through the selection while it stays open.
• Command+I opens Get Info. Holding Option instead opens a single inspector window that follows the selection rather than stacking up one window per file.
• Shift+Command+G opens a field for typing a path, with tab completion.

Two of these change the shape of a work session. Quick Look with a multiple selection turns a folder of unnamed screenshots into something readable without opening an application, and the inspector variant of Get Info removes the pile of windows that otherwise accumulates while checking a dozen files.

Handing the selection to another application

The last part of most file tasks is giving the files to something else, and Finder has four routes that avoid a save dialog entirely.

Dragging a selection onto an application icon in the Dock opens those files in that application, whether or not it is the default for the type. Dragging onto an open Terminal window pastes the paths, correctly quoted, which is the fastest way to run a command against exactly the files just picked out by eye.

The shortcut menu holds two more. Open With lists the applications registered for the type, and holding Option while the menu is open changes it to Always Open With, which sets the default for that one file without touching the setting for every file of the same kind. Quick Actions at the bottom of the same menu run rotate, convert, and create PDF without opening anything, and any workflow built in Shortcuts can be added to that list.

The fourth route is the path itself. Option+Command+C copies the full path of the selection to the clipboard, one line per item, ready to paste into a command, a script, or a message to someone else. Everything in this section is a way of leaving the window without losing the selection, which is worth noticing, because the number of times a day that happens is a fair measure of whether the window is doing enough.

One window with tabs instead of six windows

Finder has had tabs for years, and they are still off by default in the sense that new folders open in new windows. In Finder Settings under General, the option to open folders in tabs instead of new windows changes that for double clicks with the Command key held. Command+T adds a tab directly.

Tabs are more than tidiness here. Dragging a file onto a tab header switches to that tab mid drag, so a move between two distant folders becomes one gesture in one window. Window then Merge All Windows collapses everything already open into tabs of a single window, which is the fastest way to recover from a screen covered in strays.

The sidebar does the same job for destinations that stay constant. Dragging a folder into the Favourites section adds it, Control+Command+T adds the selection, and the order can be rearranged by dragging. Anything reachable in one click from the sidebar does not need a tab at all. What a file window should be able to do overall is set out on the features page, and how that compares with the alternatives people install is on the comparison page.

What to change first

Turn on the option to open folders in tabs, then spend a week using column view and Quick Look for everything. Those two cover most of what people install extra software to get. If the remaining friction is leaving the window to run a command on the files just selected, that is a different problem, and Atriens is built around it.