Trouble Understanding Finder

M

MMak

Registered
The one thing that really frustrates me is viewing folders/files on Mac OS X (10.3 Panther). I've been trying about a week to figure out how to reset the view of a particular directory but it only applies to that one window.

I upgraded from Jaguar to Panther, and all my files were backed up on DVDs before I installed Panther. Then after the upgrade I transferred all my files to Panther. Now all my folders and icons are the way it was in Jaguar, the size of the icons are 32x32 instead of 48x48, view as list instead of icons...etc.

How exactly can I reset/remove all the presets from before and start all over? I've tried removing all the "ds_store" files, but nothing happened whatsoever.

Thanks in advance! Any help would be appreciated.
 
Open your needed window, change the window to what you like (icon size, position, etc.) then immediately close that window. The next time you open that folder, it should be as you left it. If you really want a particular single window to always be the same, then select the folder for that window, make an alias for the folder, and put the alias on your desktop. That will give you a custom window that remains the same, as long as you get to the window through that same desktop alias. There's many ways to get into a window that might change the view, but that alias allows you to set a view that should remain. If you drag your folder to the sidebar, the effect should also still be to have that same set view.
 
Is this only for a single window? Can I apply "view as icon" for a certain directory so all folders and files within this directory will inherit these settings?

The problem is that now all folders'/files' icon sizes are 32x32. Do I have to go into each and every folder (thousands of folders) to change the icon size?
 
MMak said:
Is this only for a single window? Can I apply "view as icon" for a certain directory so all folders and files within this directory will inherit these settings?

The problem is that now all folders'/files' icon sizes are 32x32. Do I have to go into each and every folder (thousands of folders) to change the icon size?
Click to expand...

I Apologize, I thought you meant you wanted to change settings for just one folder, re-read your post, and missed your fairly clear meaning the first time. there are other threads about this issue. I think what you want is to return to default window settings, so that choosing All Windows under view options, actually will default all windows, Is that it? The closest I've seen for what you want is writing an Applescript to Folder Actions (sorry, can't offer any suggestions about how to actually do that, none of the threads that I have found have a working solution). Basically you want to write to view settings for a folder plus all its enclosed folders, to all levels. A hint that I have seen suggested: Copying the ds_store file for a correctly set window, to all folders enclosed in that folder might work. (Applescript would have to check for all folders and do the required copy action to any folders found)
I don't know if this would actually work. You could do this with one or two folders as a test, just to see if the ds_store file created in one folder would really change the view setting for any folder that it is copied to. ...
 
Let me turn the question around. Is it possible to apply "list as view" for a certain folder and it'll apply to all enclosed folders/files at all levels? I have hundreds of folders and I don't want to open every folder and assign "view as list".

Thanks in advance.
 
In View Options, you can select "All Windows" to set certain settings to all windows. Unfortunately, this does not always work for everything, more for windows of the same type (column, list, icon) than everything.

You might enjoy this article which gives a good explanation of the Finder, how it's designed, and why it's so flawed. It's a bit long compared to stories on other sites, but it's rather good.
 
Arden said:
In View Options, you can select "All Windows" to set certain settings to all windows. Unfortunately, this does not always work for everything, more for windows of the same type (column, list, icon) than everything.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply.

The one thing I really don't understand is the View Options "All Windows". It doesn't work for me at all! Here's an example...

So basically, I have a folder called "website", within that folder are three subfolders, "images, html, and graphics". I go into the window that stores the "website" folder and apply an icon size of 48x48 for "All Windows". Although when I click into the "website" folder and see if the settings are applied to my "images, html, graphics" folders, they STILL have an icon size of 32x32. And when I go into "View Options", it has on default "This Window Only" option selected.

So what's the point of having "All Windows" when it doesn't exactly apply these settings to all the folders? I think I might be missing something here, because I'm very confused. BTW, under Finder Preferences, "always open folders in new window" and "open new windows in column view" are NOT checked.

I tried trashing all ds_store files and com.apple.finder.plist and reboot. They all came back to icon view, which is what I wanted, but the icon sizes are still different.

Is there a way to select a folder and have all enclosed files/folders to have an icon size of 48x48 (Panthers default)?
 
BTW, all folders have an icon size of 48x48 and the "All Windows" settting sticks. It's the data transferred from my backup DVDs (from Jaguar) that all have 32x32 icon sizes when brought over to Panther. Perhaps there's a plist that I need to delete/regenerate?

If I create a new folder in a new directory, the icon sizes are 48x48, that's perfect. But if I create a new folder in an exisitng directory with icons 32x32, the new folder's icon size would be 32x32 also.
 
I'm sure there's a file you can hack somewhere via the Terminal, but I have no idea what it might be.

For now, I'd say just leave the view options box open as you navigate. Find somewhere to leave it so it won't be in your way too much.
 
The trick is that the "All Windows" settings only apply to windows that haven't had any view options set yet (for example by closing the window after switching views). Also the "All Windows" setting applies on a per-view-type basis, so the "All Windows" settings for icon view will affect all unset windows when switching to Icon View, and the "All Windows" settings for List View will apply to all unset windows when switching to List View.

Admittedly it's very confusing. If you start from scratch by deleting all .DS_Store files on your system ( sudo find / -name ".DS_Store" -exec rm "{}" ';' ) and then muck around with the "All Windows" settings I think you'll get the basic hang of how it behaves. You may have to restart to get the Finder to clear the view cache after deleting all those .DS_Store files.

But to answer your original question, there isn't a way currently to apply view settings to all subfolders of the selected item. You could probably force the issue by copying the .DS_Store file from the top-level folder into all its subfolders. I haven't come across - or written - a shell script to do this, but it is certainly possible. If such a shell script were written and then run through "DropScript" it would make a droplet to do what you want. Perhaps some enterprising coder here will follow up on this nifty idea.
 
I would have to second slur's recommendation of deleting all the .DS_Store files using his sudo command above.

To shed a little insight on what might be happening: you mentioned that you copied the files off of a backup back to your hard drive -- and what I think may be happening here is that if you're copying folders off of the backup, then the .DS_Store files inside of those folders are being copied as well, and somewhere, because of the media or the copying procedure, those copied .DS_Store files are somehow not getting modified when you apply new window settings so the settings don't stick.

Deleting all .DS_Store files is harmless, unless you've spent hours tweaking all your windows exactly the way you want them. Getting rid of those files will allow you to set new window settings, and I think they'll probably stick once you get rid of all of them. I do believe they won't stick because the permissions on the .DS_Store files from the backup don't match or something when you copy them back to the hard drive.
 
Thanks for all the suggestions. I copied and pasted that line into Terminal and executed that script and restarted, the DS_Store files are still here. And it retains my "View Options" preferences. What is the correct way to execute that script and "start from scratch"? Sorry, I'm new to the Mac environment.
 
OK! OK! I took the plunge and wiped out my whole drive and did an "Erase and Install" of Panther to start from scratch... It's an extreme action, but I hope to resolve this frustration and confusion.

This time I backed up all my files on DVD-R WITHOUT the "DS_Store" files and hopefully the icon size defaults to 48x48, no luck whatsoever. When I open the DVD, the icon sizes are still 32x32.

Last call...before I give up, any advice? Why do the icon sizes vary when there's no DS_Store files attached? Is there another file that holds this information that needs to be reset?

Perhaps I'm trying to do something that isn't possible.
 
Ok, are you trying to change the size of the icons on the DVD, or the hard drive? If you burned a DVD without the .DS_Store files, I'm sure that OS X is defaulting to 32x32 icons for the DVD. Besides, you can't change the icon size for a DVD or a CD because that media is not writeable and OS X cannot write NEW .DS_Store files to the CD or DVD.
 
ElDiabloConCaca said:
Ok, are you trying to change the size of the icons on the DVD, or the hard drive? If you burned a DVD without the .DS_Store files, I'm sure that OS X is defaulting to 32x32 icons for the DVD. Besides, you can't change the icon size for a DVD or a CD because that media is not writeable and OS X cannot write NEW .DS_Store files to the CD or DVD.
Click to expand...

OK. Here's the situation. I have data stored on a DVD with all the DS_Store files deleted before burning. When I drag this data to the hard drive, the icon size remains 32x32 (as what is seen on the DVD).

My question is, how to change the icon size to Panther's default, 48x48, when I drag my data from the DVD? The DVD should be a fresh start because all DS_Stores are removed and system was erased and installed from scratch.

Thanks in advance.
 
Ok, let's start this from scratch then... do this:

1. Copy all DVD backup files in question to the hard drive.

2. Close all windows.

3. Open a new finder window.

4. Navigate to the folder than contains the files and open it with a double-click.

5. Choose "Show View Options" from the View menu.

6. Set the settings how you want them in this view.

7. Immediately close the window without doing anything else to it (resizing it, moving it, clicking icons, ANYthing).

That should do it. You can re-navigate to that window/folder and see if the settings stuck. This always does it for me. The trick is not to modify the window when it first opens or before closing it at all by resizing it or moving it or doing anything inside the window. If there are subfolders in this folder, do the same thing as above -- you may have to set the view setting for each subfolder individually.

I hope that does it!
 
ElDiabloConCaca said:
If there are subfolders in this folder, do the same thing as above -- you may have to set the view setting for each subfolder individually.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the tip. But I believe this sentence answered my question. There is no way to change "all" folder/file icons to Panther's default of 48x48 in one single action.

I wonder why in the word did Apple change Panther's icons to 48x48 when Jaguar's is 32x32? Is it only me or do the rest of you have different sized icons all over your hard drive?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top