Many thanks to the Mac OS X Tips Web site - they posted a list of “Hidden Settings for Leopard,” and I found one that does something I’ve wished I could do for a long time...
“Hidden setting” usually means a setting you can’t make using the System Preferences control panel. Rather, you enter special text commands in the Terminal to change how the operating system works. (Terminal is the way you give old-school Unix commands to your computer; Mac OSX is really Unix under the hood. The Terminal program is located in Applications/Utilities).
Anyway, this particular setting lets you replace the title in a Finder window with its full path. So, instead of “Documents” shown as the title of a window, it would say “/Users/vince/Documents.” Check out the before and after below; we're looking at the title of the window - the centered text at the top of the window.
Before:
After:
This is something Windows has always been able to do, and is very useful for identifying “where you are” on your computer - especially if you’re accessing other computers on a network. I frequently get in trouble when I’m using my Macbook but also browsing the hard drive on my Mac Pro tower downstairs. Am I looking at documents on the Macbook? Or the tower? Previously, each of the two windows would say just “Documents.”
Here’s the command:
defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES
Just copy that line, launch Terminal, and paste. Log out and log back in, or restart, and you’re set!
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