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Comment by schrodingersCat | Hacker News Reader

The major (and really only) criticism of Finder is a lack of an "address" bar. I would really like a bar where I can change directories quickly instead of doing ALL navigation using mouse clicks. Yes, I know you can invoke a Command-Shift-G to do this in a secondary menu, but Explorer has this built in. Having an address bar with tab completion and unix file-system shortcut support (i.e. "~", ".", "..") would be great!

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This may help. One little-known feature: if you drag a folder to a File Open/Save dialog, it'll navigate to that folder! (This is unlike Windows, where it would move that folder.)

If you have the folder already open in another Finder window, you can drag its icon next to the title in the titlebar (top of window.)

You can also drag a folder (or that icon) to Terminal to grab the path.

Since I always seem to have a Terminal window or three open for one reason or another, I quite often find myself just typing (e.g.) "open ~/physics/books/" when I need that sort of thing. If you don't have Terminal up, it's more of a pain. (Spotlight isn't as handy for that use, though it can be pretty effective in other ways.)

The "Go to Folder" input box does support command completion (e.g., type Command-Shift-G, enter "~/Doc", and type Tab), but it's super lame compared to what you get on the command line: Finder only gives you the first possible completion. So if you want to open up "~/Library/Application Support", you have to type all the way up to the "u" before hitting tab, because "~/Library/Application Scripts" is the first match.

Agreed. I think that Apple wants to keep things simple, but this is a reasonable option for power users. Heck, I would settle for being able to enter paths in the search widget! It would be trivial to interpret searches starting with forward slash to be interpreted as "go to that path".

I had to experiment today on how to copy current path in Yosemite [1], is there a better way without custom scripts or addons?

[1] http://apple.stackexchange.com/a/161525/74761

The best way I've found to mimic an address bar is to use Command-Shift-G to open the "Go to this address" dialog. It gets the job done well enough when I do end up using Finder over Terminal.

Command-Shift-G does support tab completion and "~".

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