Читать книгу macOS Sierra For Dummies - Bob LeVitus - Страница 10

Windows are a ubiquitous part of using a Mac. When you open a folder, you see a window. When you write a letter, the document that you’re working on appears in a window. When you browse the Internet, web pages appear in a window … and so on.

For the most part, windows are windows from program to program. You’ll probably notice that some programs (Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Word, for example) take liberties with windows by adding features such as custom toolbars or textual information (such as zoom percentage or file size) around the edges of the document window and in toolbars.

Don’t let it bug you; that extra fluff is just window dressing (pun intended). Maintaining the window metaphor, many information windows display different kinds of information in different panes, or discrete sections within the window.

When you finish this chapter, which focuses exclusively on macOS Finder windows, you’ll know how to use most windows in most applications.

And so, without further ado, the following list gives you a look at the main features of a typical Finder window (as shown in Figure 2-1). I discuss these features in greater detail in later sections of this chapter.

FIGURE 2-1: A typical Finder window in macOS Sierra.

If your windows don’t look exactly like the one shown in Figure 2-1, don’t be concerned. You can make your windows look and feel any way you like. As I explain later in the “Working with Windows” section, moving and resizing windows are easy tasks.

Meanwhile, here’s what you see on the toolbar: (clockwise from top left):

❯❯ Close, Minimize, and Zoom buttons: Shut ’em, shrink ’em, and grow ’em.

❯❯ View buttons: Choose among four exciting views of your window: Icon, List, Column, and Cover Flow. Find out more about views in Chapter 4.

❯❯ Arrange menu: Click this little doohickey to arrange this window’s icons by Name, Kind, Application, Date Modified, Date Created, Date Last Opened, Date Added, Size, or Tags. Or, of course, by None, which is the default.

❯❯ Action menu: This button is really a pop-up menu of commands you can apply to currently selected items in the Finder window or on the Desktop. (These are generally the same commands you’d see in the Contextual menu if you right-clicked or Control-clicked the same items.)

❯❯ Window title: Shows the name of the window.

-click (or Control-click) the window title to see a pop-up menu with the complete path to this folder (try it). This tip applies to most windows you’ll encounter, not just Finder windows. So – or Control-click a window’s title (a right-click or two-fingered tap on a trackpad will work, too), and you’ll usually see the path to its enclosing folder on your disk.

You can also have the path displayed at the bottom of every Finder window by choosing View ⇒ Show Path Bar.

❯❯ Share menu: Another button that’s actually a menu; click it to share selected files or folders via email, Messages, AirDrop, or Notes.

❯❯ Tags menu: Yet another button/menu; click it to assign a tag to the selected files or folders.

❯❯ Search field: Type a string of characters here, and macOS Sierra digs into your system to find items that match by filename or document contents (yes, words within documents).

❯❯ Scroll bars: Use the scroll bars for moving around a window.

❯❯ Sidebar: Frequently used items live here.

❯❯ Forward and Back buttons: These buttons take you to the next or previous folder displayed in this particular window.

If you’re familiar with web browsers, the Forward and Back buttons in the Finder work the same way. The first time you open a window, neither button is active. But as you navigate from folder to folder, these buttons remember your breadcrumb trail so you can quickly traverse backward or forward, window by window. You can even navigate this way from the keyboard by using the shortcuts +[ for Back and +] for Forward.

The Forward and Back buttons remember only the other folders you’ve visited that appear in that open window. If you’ve set a Finder Preference so that a folder always opens in a new window – or if you forced a folder to open in a new window, which I describe in a bit – the Forward and Back buttons won’t work. You have to use the modern, macOS-style window option, which uses a single window, or the buttons are useless.

Top o’ the window to ya!

Take a gander at the top of a window – any window. You see three buttons in the top-left corner and the name of the window in the top center. The three buttons (called “gumdrop buttons” by some folks because they look like, well, gumdrops) are officially known as Close, Minimize, and Zoom, and their colors (red, yellow, and green, respectively unless you’ve switched to the Graphite appearance in the General System Preference pane as described in Chapter 5) pop off the screen. Here’s what they do:

❯❯ Close (red): Click this button to close the window.

❯❯ Minimize (yellow): Click this button to minimize the window. Clicking Minimize appears to close the window, but instead of making it disappear, Minimize adds an icon for the window to the right side of the Dock.

See the section about minimizing windows into application icons in Chapter 3 if a document icon doesn’t appear in your Dock when you minimize its window.

To view the window again, click the Dock icon for the window that you minimized. If the window happens to be a QuickTime movie, the movie audio continues to play and a tiny still image from the video appears as its icon in the Dock. (I discuss the Dock in detail in Chapter 3.)

❯❯ Zoom (green): Click a window’s green Zoom button, and the window expands to cover the whole screen, including the menu bar.

If you prefer the old behavior, where a window zoomed to the largest size it could but didn’t cover the full screen, hold down the Option key when you click the green button.

To shrink the window back to its previous dimensions, slide the cursor up to the very top of the screen, wait for the menu bar to appear, and then click the green Zoom button.

Another way to escape from a full-screen window, at least in the Finder, is to press the Esc key on your keyboard. Sadly, this trick doesn’t work with some apps, though it’s quite useful in apps that support it as well as in the Finder.

If you prefer the old behavior, where a window zoomed to a larger size but didn’t cover the full screen, hold down the Option key when you click the green button.

El Capitan (OS X 10.11) introduced a new feature called Split View to the green gumdrop button. To see Split View in action, press the green button for a moment (that is, perform the first half of a click). Half the screen turns light blue. Without releasing the mouse button, drag to the left or right; the blue tint moves to the left or right side of the screen. Release the mouse button and the window fills the blue half of the screen. The other half of the screen displays miniature versions of all open windows. Hover the cursor over a miniature window to see its name; click a miniature window and it fills that half of the screen.

To work in Split View, click either window to activate it and do what you have to do. To activate the other window, click it. To exit Split View, do one of the following:

● Press Esc.

● Move the pointer to the top of the screen; when the buttons (for both windows) reappear, click any button.

● Quit either application.

My colleague at The Mac Observer, John Martellaro, called Split View silly, but I’m not so sure. I use it for certain tasks (assuming I remember that it’s hiding under the green gumdrop button, which I often forget).

A scroll new world

Yet another way to see more of what’s in a window or pane is to scroll through it. Scroll bars appear at the bottom and right sides of any window or pane that contains more stuff – icons, text, pixels, or whatever – than you can see in the window. Figure 2-2, for example, shows two instances of the same window: Dragging the scroll bar on the right side of the smaller window would reveal the icons above and below the six that are currently visible. Dragging the scroll bar on the bottom of the smaller window would reveal items to the left and right of the six that are currently visible.

FIGURE 2-2: The same window twice; in the front window, you use the scroll bars to see the hidden icons that are visible in the back window.

Simply click and drag a scroll bar to move it up or down or side to side.

If your scroll bars don’t look exactly like the ones in Figure 2-2 or work as described in the following list, don’t worry. These are System Preferences you can configure to your heart’s desire, which you can discover in Chapter 5.

Here are some ways you can scroll in a window:

❯❯ Click a scroll bar and drag. The content of the window scrolls proportionally to how far you drag the scroll bar.

❯❯ Click in the scroll bar area but don’t click the scroll bar itself. The window scrolls either one page up (if you click above the scroll bar) or down (if you click below the scroll bar). You can change a setting in your General System Preference pane to cause the window to scroll proportionally to where you click.

For what it’s worth, the Page Up and Page Down keys on your keyboard function the same way as clicking the white scroll area (the vertical scroll bar only) in the Finder and many applications. These keys don’t work in every program, though, so don’t become too dependent on them. Also, if you purchased a mouse, trackball, or other pointing device that has a scroll wheel, you can scroll vertically in the active (front) window with the scroll wheel or press and hold down the Shift key to scroll horizontally. Alas, this horizontal scrolling-with-the-Shift-key works in Finder windows but not in all applications. For example, it works in the Apple TextEdit application, but not in Microsoft Word.

❯❯ Use the keyboard. In the Finder, first click an icon in the window and then use the arrow keys to move up, down, left, or right. Using an arrow key selects the next icon in the direction it indicates – and automatically scrolls the window, if necessary. In other programs, you might or might not be able to use the keyboard to scroll. The best advice I can give you is to try it – either it will work or it won’t.

❯❯ Use a two-finger swipe (on a trackpad). If you have a notebook with a trackpad or use a Magic Trackpad or Magic Mouse, just move the arrow cursor over the window and then swipe the trackpad with two fingers to scroll.

(Hyper)active windows

To work within a window, the window must be active. The active window is always the frontmost window, and inactive windows always appear behind the active window. Only one window can be active at a time. To make a window active, click it anywhere – in the middle, on the title bar, or on a scroll bar. It doesn’t matter where; just click anywhere to activate it.

The exceptions are the Close, Minimize, and Zoom buttons on inactive windows, which always do what they do, regardless of whether a window is active or inactive.

Look at Figure 2-3 for an example of an active window in front of an inactive window (the Applications window and the Utilities window, respectively).

FIGURE 2-3: An active window in front of an inactive window.

The following is a list of the major visual cues that distinguish active from inactive windows:

❯❯ The active window’s title bar: By default, the Close, Minimize, and Zoom buttons are bright red, yellow, and green, respectively. If you chose the Graphite Appearance in the General System Preferences pane, they’ll be dark gray; the inactive windows’ buttons are light gray regardless of Appearance settings.

❯❯ This is a nice visual cue. Colored items are active, and gray ones are inactive. Better still, if you move your mouse over an inactive window’s gumdrop buttons, they light up in their usual colors so you can close, minimize, or zoom an inactive window without first clicking it to making it active. Neat!

❯❯ The active window’s toolbar: Toolbar buttons are darker and more distinctive; the inactive window’s toolbar buttons are light gray and more subdued.

❯❯ The active window’s drop shadow: Notice how the active window has a more prominent shadow? This tricks your eye into thinking the active window is in front of the inactive one.

One last thing: If you’re wondering how to resize a window, just hover the cursor over a window’s edge or corner or over the dividing line between two panes in the same window (such as the Sidebar and the main area of Finder windows). A helpful little arrow appears as a visual cue that you can now drag the edge, corner, or dividing line to resize the window or pane.