Comments on: A “Go to Parent of Current Folder” Toolbar Button for Finder

By: David Rogoff

David Rogoff — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 01:44:54 +0000

Thanks much! I’m switching from XP to SL and was going crazy trying to find this.

By: Ali Rantakari

Ali Rantakari — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 19:49:16 +0000

Hi Mike,

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.

By: Mike K

Mike K — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 15:12:47 +0000

Do you really not know this? There is a button for this built into the finder. If you control-click on the toolbar of a finder window, you’ll get a contextual menu with the option “Customize toolbar…” If you select this, one of the available buttons is “Path”. If you put the Path button on the toolbar, you can click it to get a drop down menu of not just the parent folder but the entire enclosing heirarchy of the current folder. Pick the parent folder from the dropdown, and away you go. No scripting needed.

By: Felix Ogg

Felix Ogg — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:50:13 +0000

I was annoyed at first too. But then I discovered that Apple UI team decided that this is typical usage for advanced, hierarchy-thinkers: the finder is designed to let you search for things using the spotlight thingamajiggy.

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).

By: SCOTT NOW4REAL954

SCOTT NOW4REAL954 — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 07:07:20 +0000

OH MY GOD THIS IS GREAT…I STUMBLED UPON THIS FROM A TUAW BLOG…AND I AM IN LOVE WITH THIS…I HAVE ALWAYS HAD THE SAME ISSUE WITH THAT BACK AND FORTH THING…LOVE IT THANK YOU

By: Alcmene

Alcmene — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 09:31:55 +0000

Hi there,
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 :)