News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

November 18, 2006

tips

Make Save dialog boxes useful by default

Posted Nov. 18, ’06, 8:03 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Tips

Shrunken SaveI find myself occasionally frustrated by OS X’s Open and Save dialog boxes—none so much as when I was briefly using OS 9 a few weeks ago, and realized that in many ways, its Open and Save windows were both more useful and faster. Not that that’s about to get me switching back to the OS of yesteryear, but anything I can do to speed up my battle with these everyday necessities would be great.

To the rescue came our Macworld colleague (and noted superspy) Rob “007” Griffiths with a handy tip for the Save/Save As windows. While it hardly fixes everything about the Save window that I dislike, it does combat one continuing annoyance: the fact that, by default, the panes are provided in “minimized” form (like above). With a quick bit of Terminal voodoo, you can change it so that all Save/Save As windows across the board show up in gloriously expanded useful form. And that voodoo?

defaults write -g NSNavPanelExpandedStateForSaveMode -bool TRUE

Just pop that in a Terminal window, and you’ll never have to hit one of the blue expanding buttons again (of course, should you, for some inexpicable reason want to change them back, issue same command with TRUE replaced by FALSE). Rob, the children everywhere thank you.


3 Comments

Dillon K. said:

Oooh, that's great! I'm constantly having to click that darned blue arrow!

November 18, 2006 8:53 AM
Collin Allen said:

THANK YOU! This rocks.

November 18, 2006 11:22 PM

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