Hacker News Reader

Comment by masswerk | Hacker News Reader

If you want to use any of these,

1) Navigate in the Finder to /System/Library/CoreServices/

2) Open "CoreTypes.bundle" by right-clicking it and selecting "Sow Package Contents" from the centext menu, then open the "Contents" folder, then "Resources"

3) There they are! Find a suitable icon (preview either with "Get Info" or by double-clicking, which will open them in Preview)

4) In a second window, navigate to the folder you want to decorate.

5) Select it and open its file info with "Get Info" (either using Command + I, the context menu, or "Get Info" in the "File" menu)

6) Drag and drop the .icns file onto the little icon at the top left. (Not onto the big preview.) You have now successfully copied the icns resources.

To revert to the default icon, just select the small icon in the file info and hit delete.

View on HN

You can also press Shift + Command + G and paste /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/ to go there directly.

Unfortunately, even if you set a custom icon for a folder, it'll still show as default icon in the sidebar. I wanted to give my ~/dev sidebar entry the developer icon, but sadly it seems to be hardcoded ~/Developer indeed.

>> Unfortunately, even if you set a custom icon for a folder...

Yeah this is what I hoped the article was going to demonstrate, unfortuntely it was just a case of "did you know you had all these system icons already on your system?", to which the answer was "well yeah..."

> You can also press Shift + Command + G

Ok, after 10 years of Mac OS, I'm only learning this right now?? And I'm stupid because it's right there in the "Go" menu… I used to just launch a terminal and use the "open" command…

Many thanks for this.

So many applications and such have shortcuts that are quite useful but hidden. It can be worth a few minutes crawling through the menus and accessibility settings.

The one I like is you can universally change the short cut for paste so that “paste without formatting” is the default CMD-V

That's a very good idea. But do you just create one for "All Applications" called "Paste without formatting"?

Yes though iirc I had to do something special for Office. Not at my computer to check, but office was the most important one.

> Unfortunately…

Yes, this is a favorite petty grievance of mine: this used to work until some years ago and it was very helpful for quickly navigating to key folders, like those used for your current project, as you hadn't to actually read the sidebar items. For another few OS iterations this could be fixed by add-ons, but then this also wasn't an option anymore. (Apple really invested into making this not an option. I guess, this coincided with Jonathan Ive's takeover of interface design, when clean looks according to design templates became more important than usability.)

The Terror of Clean Looks, Part 2

"This proxy icon really fuzzes with my clean looks. Let's make it so that is hidden, but, when you hover long enough over it or click it, it will appear and shift to the title to the right. This only causes a break-down of your visual mapping and will force your brain into a 0.2s timeout for reorientation, but my design template is worth it. Now you only have to reposition the mouse pointer and click once again and there you are… — This is really how modeless direct manipulation should be done!"

Who ever did this to my Mac, if you're reading this, repent.

Try: defaults write com.apple.finder NSWindowSupportsAutomaticInlineTitle -bool false, then killall Finder

Reply on news.ycombinator.com