hasseg.orgA “Go to Parent of Current Folder” Toolbar Button for Finder
Posted on January 10, 2008
Filed under Featured, Mac, Programming, Scripts
Although the updated version introduced with Leopard significantly improves upon the one in Tiger, I still think Mac OS’s Finder is lacking in several departments. I Don’t feel “at home” with separate file managers (Path Finder or ForkLift, for example — even though I do own a license to the latter, I only use it as an SFTP client,) so I’ve taken it upon myself to improve the experience of using Finder. The first thing that annoyed me with it was the fact that even though you could use the key combo Command(or Apple key) + Up arrow to go to the parent of the current folder, there was no button in the toolbar for it (which is exactly how I would prefer to invoke this action.) Well, due to the fact that you can drag any application to Finder’s toolbar, it’s quite easy to add your own buttons there.
Update (feb 13, 08): Updated the app to have a much nicer icon (made by Matti Schneider — thanks!)
It’s ridiculously easy to tell Finder to go to the parent of the currently open folder with Applescript, so that’s what I did – I wrote an Applescript for this and saved it as an application. Then I added a nice icon for the app (made by Matti Schneider) that would not look out of place in the Finder toolbar, and dragged it there. Voilà:
Oh yeah, and here’s the Applescript I used:
tell front window to set theFolder to target
tell front window to set target to parent of target
tell front window to select theFolder
end tell
Comments
6 Responses to “A “Go to Parent of Current Folder” Toolbar Button for Finder”
I don’t have a website hosting my scripts, but I do have written some, quite in the kind of this one (almost all of them are desgined to be Finder Toolbar extensions). If you are interested in it, just send a mail to me, I would love to have some feedback :)
So far, here are my “finalised” ones :
- DesktopAnimator (use your screensaver as your wallpaper, a _very_ little script, just a shell command wrapped up)
- lnCreator (GUI for the ln command, quite appreciable in the Finder :) supports drag’n'drop, multiple files…)
- EjectAll (to eject almost immediately all mounted disk images / optionnaly every mounted media, especially useful after some software downloading session)
I also made a nice icon for the Browse Full Screen lovely script from Apple (that I wanted to write, but well…).
Sorry, this isn’t advertising, I just want to let you decide if this is of any interest to you or not ;)
Regards :)
However, for us power-users, they were kind enough to provide CMD+UP-ARROW. Which – admittedly – works predictable as well as nicely opposite to CMD- DOWN-ARROW (drill into folder).
I am indeed aware of this useful feature. Nevertheless, as you know, the path dropdown button requires two clicks (and a small movement of the mouse in between) to navigate to the parent folder instead of just one click. Admittedly a small optimization but still significant enough for me to do for something that I use tens of times a day. I also prefer to access the path dropdown (whenever I happen to need it — though I use the Path bar instead much more often) by cmd-clicking on the Finder window title.