Finder View Options Not Sticking

hey all.. switched over to a macbook a month ago and still try to get used to the new OS. one thing thats annoying me is the Finder view options are not sticking. i searched everywhere and couldnt find a useful solution.

i want all my windows to be in the "List" view and also to be sorted by "Kind" ... i used Automater to change the views on all my folders, but new folders do not stick with this convention i want.

under Finder > "Show View Options" ... i selected "All Windows" for the view I like, but it does not seem to stick globally..

any ideas what this noob is doin wrong haha

That SHOULD have worked. When you do it manually, a window at a time, does it work?

Do note that if you have PREVIOUSLY set a window's view settings manually, this manual setting will override any global "all windows" settting, as it should. Could this be the case? Could you be seeing some windows not behaving as you wish from the global setting because they have been manually set previously?

Does anyone know of a way to override ALL manual settings and FORCE all windows into conformance? Automator does sound like the right approach...

I'd suggest running the OnyX routines and clean everything up and then try it again!

yup.. when i set the view settings on a single window, the settings DO stick. when i create new folders, the view options are as default (not the list convention as i want) so i do have to manually update the view settings for each newly created folder. and obviously that is beginning to get really annoying.

so even though i did manually set the view options for single windows, newly created windows are not sticking with the global options i want to apply for "all windows"

i am downloading onyx right now.. hopefully that can clean things up

i ran onyx and restored everything back to default... unfortunately settings are still not sticking

i attached two screen shots..

1st screen shot i applied the view options to "All Windows" under my Home directory

2nd screen shot shows that when i opened another window (Library in this case).. the view option is still as default.

:dummy: this OS just doesnt like me

Thats a great and very basic question, and I an surprised to admit that I haven't got a clue what the answer is.

M-F readers, how do you set the default view options that are applied to all new folders that are created from Finder?

^ bumping.. can a mod maybe move this topic to the OS X - operating system sub-forum?

blahh .. called Apple Support today and they explained that i can only have it as a column view, theres no way to automatically have the list view stick globally... i dont understand how something so simple like this has been overlooked and i almost thought this OS was perfect

This complaint is as old as OS X.

I copied and edited various AppleScripts that would open every folder on the drive and set them to list view, but all of them failed somewhere along the line, so I gave up. I couldn't figure out how to stop the script from opening folders that can't be accessed — system folders, for instance — and the scripts would stall. If they didn't, or before they'd stall anyway, the machine would run out of RAM and freeze. Even those folders that did switch to list view won't open where you want them to. You have to move them with the mouse at least once before that'll happen.

So I attached a few folder actions to the most-used folders. This old post explains how that works.

hey brown study, i tried out your script and it worked well, however.. is there a way to set the folder action to apply for sub-folders as well?

on one of the script commands, you have "on opening folder this_folder" is there another option for sub_folders?

vipervin said:

. . . is there another option for sub_folders?

Click to expand...

Not that I know of.

I'm not very good at figuring out the syntax of new and complicated AppleScripts, so I search the web for something that comes close and change it if I need to and can. (I had Quickeys for systems 7 to 9. I should have bought it for System X. You can do anything with QuicKeys. Subfolders would be a cakewalk.)

I'm sure a script could be written that would create a folder and attach an action to it, but each new folder would need another name if more than one were created within the same folder. If there are a bunch of folders that already exist, the script would be easier to write, but I doubt I could figure it out on my own in under a month.

I found a few scripts and syntax hints here, but you'd have to be careful because it seems that every time System X is updated, there are syntax changes. If you use a script that was current for System 10.2, it might bounce in 10.4.

One thing you should do, however, is go to the AppleScript Utility in the AppleScript folder in the Applications folder, and click on Enable GUI Scripting. This will allow you to type in commands that include the return key, among others, allowing such commands as:

tell application "System Events" to keystroke "She sold sea shells"
tell application "System Events" to keystroke tab
tell application "System Events" to keystroke return

Some applications allow recording. If you open a Script Editor blank and click on Record, then click on the desktop and create a new folder, open it and move the window around, you'll see the actions being recorded, and you can swipe the commands for other scripts.

I copied the list view and hide toolbar commands from a recording. System 9's recording ability was much more robust than System X's, though.

Sorry I can't be of more help.