Cool finder trick... now how did I do it?

L

Lazarus18

In debt medical student
This has been bugging me for awhile, and hopefully someone knows how to do it.

Many moons ago I saw a hint for changing the home icon in the finder toolbar. I did it. It's very nice. My home icon now is the same as whatever icon I put on the home folder. Looks snazzy. I have no idea how I did it however. com.apple.finer.plist doesn't have anything to do with it, I've figured that much out.

Yesterday I hosed my laptop and instead of reinstalling OSX I copied the entire system folder from my desktop to my laptop. Now my laptop has the same change made in the finder, so the trick lies in there somewhere (small territory, I know).

Anyone have any bright ideas?
 

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hmm, I'd like to be able to change my 'computer' icon from an iMac to an iBook .. that would be cool. (sorry, I don't know how)
 
that's not what I'm wondering. That's easy enough to do, just change the computer.icns in System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/Resources/ to a new one with the same name (it has to be a 32x32 icon).

Changing the home icon is what I'm wondering about, because unlike changing the computer icon, it doesn't affect all users. It's specific to my account, other users get the normal home icon, even if they paste a new icon on the folder bearing their account name.
 
I've never had to make alias's to change my icons, I have a picture of an iBook with my desktop on the screen as my computer icon, and have swapped my home icon a couple of times, it was as easy as cut and paste.

1. Find the icon you want and open the file info box with Apple-I
2. Click the icon in the info box and use Apple-C to copy it
3. Select the file you want to replace the icon of, and open the file info box.
4. click the icon here, and press Apple-V to paste in the new icon.

I think you may have to login as root in order to change folders outside of your own home folder - such as hard drive icons, etc. And sometimes, you'll need to log out and in before the change takes effect.
 
I guess I should add that the DS9 icon is my home folder icon at the moment.

Yeah, the other users have a little house. The only other thing worth mentioning is that logged in as another user my home folder still has a custom icon, instead of reverting to a folder. All others are folders and the active user is a house.

If I go snooping around in the finder.app/contents/resources and look at the home.icns it is still a little house.

com.apple.finder.plist is the most logical. The entry for my home is: (I've replaced < with { and > with } since the board wipes them out.)

{dict}
{key}file-data{/key}

{dict}
{key}_CFURLAliasData{/key}
{data}
AAAAAAECAAIAAQdNYWMgT1NYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAC35CldSCsAAAAAFHEGcnNpbGdlAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABS7rfkK3EBwAGPApoDI///
//8AAAAgAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABVVzZXJzAAABAAQA
ABRxAAIAFE1hYyBPU1g6VXNlcnM6cnNpbGdlAA4ADgAG
AHIAcwBpAGwAZwBlAA8AEAAHAE0AYQBjACAATwBTAFgA
EAAIAAC35G+tAAAAEQAIAAC35HHBAAD//wAA
{/data}
{key}_CFURLString{/key}
{string}/Users/myusername/{/string}
{key}_CFURLStringType{/key}
{integer}0{/integer}
{/dict}
{key}item-id{/key}
{string}loc%20{/string}
{/dict}


This means little to me. Clearly I wasn't smart enough to do this on my own, I was following someone's instructions. But it's a cool trick and I'd like to be able to reproduce it, as well as let others do it.

It is not an alias (at least not a normal one), because there is no arrow and it takes me to my actual user folder when clicked, not to an alias of that folder in another location.

Also, when I drag my home folder up to the titlebar I get the standard little house up there like you normally would. So I guess this is an alias of some sort.
 
OK, y'all got me thinking about how this whole thing was actually acting. It is just an alias, and it is actually incredibly simple to do.

Just drag anything that is NOT your home folder up there. If you drag your home folder the plist will show an entry of HOME. I used the utilities folder inside of applications as an example.

Then go into your com.apple.finder.plist and look for (< and > again replaced w/ {and })
{string}/Applications/Utilities{/string}
and simply change that to {string}/Users/yourusername/{/string}. Viola! Simple enough. Thanks for providing brain stimulation testuser.
 
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