Finder - folders on top?

[btownguy]

Is there a setting in OSX that will set the Finder to show folders on the top before individual files - much in the same way Windows does?

 

[GGJstudios]

Searching the forum with MRoogle will usually find answers to most of your questions:

Tabs in Finder, Folders always on top, no more .DS_store with ...
Snow Leopard - Finder - Sort folders first, then files - Mac Forums
How to make folders go to the top in list view - Mac Forums

 

[btownguy]

I was hoping for a better solution - I had come across most of those "solutions" in my searching. They seem more like hacks than true solutions.

 

[-aggie-]

To summarize the above, no there's not. There are some partial fixes, but nothing that gets you to the way Windows does it. You'll need 3rd party software to do it (kind of silly, huh).

 

[notjustjay]

The link to TotalFinder above looks interesting, I'll try that when I get home.

The bottom line is that this seems to stem from the Unix filesystem roots, where folders and files are treated identically. Of course, they have the option to "ls --group-directories-first".

I think Apple really should make it a user choice. I can see the argument either way.

 

[rrfk]

Finder Alternatives

My search for a finder alternative began after I lost many (thousands) of MP3 files when I 'copied' a like named folder into the root of another that contained my complete music collection and to my horror it deleted my collection as it replaced my thousands of files with 8 because finder likes to replace not update directories.

I don't want to pay for PathFinder http://www.cocoatech.com/ which rocks on my work machine.
I'm not ready to upgrade to Snow Leopard yet for TotalFinder http://totalfinder.binaryage.com/.
Forklift http://www.binarynights.com/forklift is WAY TOO beta. It has potential and looks pretty but lacks lots, like smb sharing in the 'Connect to' dialog and doesn't share the same links in the left panel with Finder (but it looks the same/identical) all in all way too beta for a paid program.

So, my choice is muCommander http://www.mucommander.com/.
The short list:

• Virtual filesystem with support for local volumes, FTP, SFTP, SMB, NFS, HTTP, Amazon S3, Hadoop HDFS and Bonjour
• Quickly copy, move, rename files, create directories, email files...
• Browse, create and uncompress ZIP, RAR, 7z, TAR, GZip, BZip2, ISO/NRG, AR/Deb and LST archives
• ZIP files can be modified on-the-fly, without having to recompress the whole archive
• Universal bookmarks and credentials manager
• Multiple windows support
• Full keyboard access
• Highly configurable
• Available in 23 languages : American & British English, French, German, Spanish, Czech, Simplified & Traditional Chinese, Polish, Hungarian, Russian, Slovenian, Romanian, Italian, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, Slovak, Japanese, Swedish, Danish, Ukrainian and Arabic.
• ***Free Software (GPL)***

It's (like) TotalCommander on every OS
I am not being paid to say this. As a new Mac (+2 yrs now after 30 yrs on Windows) I just know your pain trying to use Finder like Windows Explorer and the frustrations it yields.

 

[Gregg2]

My search for a finder alternative began after I lost many (thousands) of MP3 files when I 'copied' a like named folder into the root of another that contained my complete music collection and to my horror it deleted my collection as it replaced my thousands of files with 8 because finder likes to replace not update directories.

But, in reality it did what you "told" it to do. As you discovered, you cannot assume that two totally different operating systems will behave the same.