Make Finder sort by type with Folders at top

I find it quite strange that no one has yet asked this question on these forums, as this appears to be a very popular question on many other forums.

In case you are wondering, yes, there is a way to make Finder sort by type with Folders at the top (or bottom) without using 3rd party applications as shown in the following screenshot:

The method to achieve this is incredibly simple. All you need to have is Administrator privileges and knowledge of how to use a Text editor.

1. Select Finder, click on Go from the menu bar and select Go to Folder:



2. From the dialog box that opens, type:
/System/Library/CoreServices/
and press Return:



3. Locate Finder.app, right click on it, and select Show Package Contents:



4. Navigate to Contents>Resources>English.lproj and open InfoPlist.strings in a text editor:

5. Navigate to the line which says
"Folder" = "Folder";
at around line 7 of the file, and simply add an empty space or a symbol (such as "." or "~") in front of the second "Folder".:



6. Save the text file, type in the Administrator password when asked, and close the text file.

7. The final step would be to restart finder, which you can achieve by holding in the ALT or OPTION key and right clicking on the Finder icon in Dock, then selecting Relaunch.

Now, if you click on the Kind tab in Finder (see screenshot at top of this post), your folders should be automatically sorted at the top.

 

Interesting, Budding! I don't personally sort that way, but if I ever need to, now I know where to go to find out .

 

Finder has crashed on me a couple of times, originally forcing me to reboot the entire computer to regain control. This will be a handy trick to use in the future indeed.

 

This has been posted on here before. It does not, unfortunately, work for Tiger.


http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=2641499&postcount=16

 

Yeah, did not work for me in Tiger either. Never tried in Leopard.

 

Yeah, these instructions only work for Leopard. You can accomplish the same thing in Tiger, just the files are in a different location.

Directions for Tiger --> HERE.

 

This is exactly what I want to do. I'm a new convert to Mac and have been really enjoying it, though the folder sorting really bugs me.

I don't have any other users on this computer, so my account should be the Administrator, but when I try to modify the InfoPlist.strings file, I can't. When I "get info" on the InfoPlist.strings file, the privilege is that only "system" has write privileges -- what does this mean? I thought I had full privileges as the Admin account... can anyone help me on this? Appreciate it!!

 

The admin password, should be your password for your account if your the single user and admin.

Depending on the file, you can also edit the privileges. In the get info window, down the sharing & permissions, click the lock, enter password, and change accordingly.

But the short answer is use your user password, and it should fix it.

If that doesn't work, what exactly is the error message you're getting? can you post a screenshot or something?

 

im getting the same error message, i tried changing the permission in "Get Info" and no success..

 

well.. i managed to save the file, i just changed the folder's permissions.
but it doesnt show the options to sort by kind

 

Try reading the first post in this thread again. Also pay attention to the screenshots.

 

where is the kind tab?

you are using pathfinder aren't you?
how do i get it to display the path in the bottom?

 

Well no dice here. I have tried to change the permissions but i get that same error.

 

I was able to change the privilege of the InfoPlist.strings file [picture 1] but I still get the same error message saying I don't have the write privileges. Does anyone have any idea why?

 

Oh, I got to change the file, finally! Not sure if this was overkill, but I thought it was because each higher folder (e.g., system, library, etc.) also had various permissions. Now I will have to change them all back to read only for safety purposes.

Strongerthanall -- to make it work, you need to click the "kind" sort so that all the files will resort, with folders going to the top since we essentially change the folder type to have a space first, hence having it sorted first.

Thanks!!

 

What if you want them sorted in column view?

 

Nothing that I know of, since column view doesn't really support sorting.