6 Useful Keyboard Shortcuts in the Finder (Mac)

Change the name of some documents, find the breadcrumbs or quickly open the preferences. It’s all possible with a few simple shortcuts. This makes it easy to find your way in the Finder.

Enable the breadcrumbs in the Finder so easily:

• Open the Finder. This is the smiling face on the Dock.
• Press the Cmd+Option(Alt)+P keys.

A gray bar appears at the bottom of the Finder screen. When you click on a document, the breadcrumb trail will appear in this gray bar. This way you can see exactly where a document is.

Here’s how to open Finder preferences with a keyboard shortcut:

• Open the Finder. This is the smiling face on the Dock.
• Hold down the Cmd key and the comma key at the same time.

A new window containing the Finder preferences will open. For example, you can change the default folder in which the Finder opens, set tags and determine which items should be on the Desktop.

By default, the Finder shows three columns of information about the document: name, type, and date opened (or edited date). But there are more options, which are easily clicked.

• Open the Finder. This is the smiling face on the Dock.
• Click on the ‘List’ display option at the top. This is the icon with three horizontal stripes.
• Place the cursor on the bar that contains the word ‘Name’.
• Press the Ctrl key and click the mouse once at the same time.

A menu appears with all the columns that can be added. For example, click Creation date or tags to add a column with that information.

Print files quickly with a convenient key combination. Print a file like this without having to open it in a program first:

• Open the Finder. This is the smiling face on the Dock.
• Click on the file you want to print.
• Press the Cmd and P keys simultaneously.

The file opens automatically and is printed.

Need multiple Finder windows side by side? Open a new window like this:

• Open the Finder. This is the smiling face on the Dock.
• Press the Option+Command+N keys.

A new Finder window will open. This window opens to the default folder you selected. Do you want to change the default folder? Then read the article ‘Adjust Finder preferences in Mac’.

Sometimes you are looking for a piece of text, but you can’t remember which document it was in. Opening all files to read through them takes a lot of time because Word or Pages has to be opened again and again. A preview of a document can be shown in the Finder. No program is started for this. This makes it a lot faster. Here’s an example of a file in the Finder:

• Open the Finder. This is the smiling face on the Dock.
• Click once on the file you want to preview.
• Press the Spacebar.

Shows a preview of the document. Press the cross in the top left to close the preview.