help with multiple finder sidebar Favorites with same name

[unfrostedpoptar]

Hi all.

I have several Favorites for folders on my local drive and network shares that have the same name (e.g. Documents). How do I tell them apart? It doesn't look like Apple allows any way to rename, change color, change order, or add dividers or subgroups to the Favorites list

It's a very big pain in the neck! Any way around this? Finder add-ons or replacements this have this feature?

Thanks,

David

 

[h9826790]

Why don't you change the folder's name? At least you can easily do that on your local driver.

 

[unfrostedpoptar]

Why don't you change the folder's name? At least you can easily do that on your local driver.

Virtually impossible. The example I gave was having Favorites for the "Documents" folder for multiple user accounts and/or the same user on multiple machines. Those can't be renamed - at least not without massively screwing up lots of other stuff.

I even learned how to use the mount / mount_afp commands in order to rename the multiple shares with different mount point names. But finder tries to be helpful and screws this up by ignoring the mount point name and displaying the share name, so I'm back to square one

 

[h9826790]

I see. My suggestion is as follow.

1) Make a new folder.

2) Rename it to whatever you want.

3) Make an alias of the "Documents" folder.

4) Put that alias in the new folder.

5) Drag the new folder to favourites.

6) Remove the original "Documents" fodder from the sidebar.

Repeat Step 1-6 until all "Documents" folder are store in different "new folder" and the sidebar with all the new name.

It will cause you one more click to enter the "Documents" folder, but the favourites will looks much better.

 

[unfrostedpoptar]

I see. My suggestion is as follow.

...

It will cause you one more click to enter the "Documents" folder, but the favourites will looks much better.

Thanks for the suggestion. I've done similar work-arounds in the past. I search more on MacRumors and on Apple's forums and found lots of people trying to do the same thing as me over the years - with no success. Apple just decided that's how Finder should work and that's that. I even checked various Finder replacements like TotalFinder and DiskOrder and they can't do it either.

I did find this link from an old MR forum thread:
http://osxdaily.com/2007/12/02/show-full-directory-path-in-finder-window-title-bars/

It doesn't change the name in the Favorites list in the Sidebar, but, at least when you select a folder, it displays the true directory path/mount-point in the title of the Finder window.

So, the only semi-solution is to mount shares using the mount_afp command to specify a different mount-point directory name than the share name and then to use the default write command to tell Finder to display this in the title bar. I still can't tell which one is which until I click on it but at least then I'll know.

Maybe they'll listen to all the requests for this and add this option in OSX 10.99