The Muse Goes "Deeper" on the Mac
I will probably get hammered for this, but it really annoys me that the "finder" does not expose everything on the machine to my prying eyes. I don't need an operating system that obscures anything from me. I want to poke into every single little nook and cranny of the file system, device drivers, logs, config files, run levels, permissions.... I'm not interested in a "friendly" interface that pats me on my hand and shows me just what I need to know. I want to dig into the whole banana and find out everything I can.
So I spent an hour looking for something like window's "Folder Options" or 08r2's "god mode" console - where I could enable file extensions and hidden and system folders. Finally My good friend and colleague Wil Genovese told me to download "Deeper" - an apple utility whose sole purpose seems to be to enable various things that are "off" by default on a Mac. I can now see the whole file system (thanks Wil!). On to the next challenge!
8 Comments
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@Chris,
Hehe.. well since I'm not yet doing any actual work on it other than reviewing code I suspect I could just restore back to the factory install and I'd be okey dokey... -
I feel your pain, Mark. This is one of those things that annoys me greatly with Macs.
Deeper is a really nice utility. Going a tab beyond deeper, in terms of the Finder, there's a cool Finder-specific application out there I like called TotalFinder (it's $15 and can be reviewed at http://totalfinder.binaryage.com/).
It has some nice features (tabbed interface, side-by-side folders, and more); with one of my favorites being the quick key command to show all files. You can open finder and just press CMD + SHIFT + . and it will reveal everything. I prefer this as I find the Finder gets cluttered when I always show all files, so this lets me toggle nicely back and forth between show and hide hidden files.
Continued good luck in your Mac-sploration! -
I recently found a shareware utility called TotalFinder. It does this too, but the reason I got it is because it has an option to group folders AT THE TOP where they belong. There are other features, but I wanted to point those out. No affiliation, just thought I'd mention it. -
Seriously, you guys are developers and you know so little about how the Finder works?
You might be interested to know a little about:
pathfinder
XFile
and a little app included with OSX called Terminal. Just type ls -laH to get a good glimse around. type man ls | more to learn how to *use* ls.
That is all, gentlemen. -
Easy there font9a - that's borderline the sort of comment that gets deleted around here. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you were being a little tongue in cheek :)
Meanwhile, it was using the command line that I found my mount points and figured out the issue with the conflicted mount aliases... so yeah - we know about how to browse with the terminal. Thanks!
-Mark
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