Need Terminal Guru - Change default finder behavior when moving between drives

Discussion in 'macOS' started by Boydbme, Oct 14, 2010.

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  1. Boydbme, Oct 14, 2010

    Boydbme macrumors member

    Boydbme

    Joined:
    Jan 30, 2008
    #1
    Hey everyone.

    I have two drives in my mac, running Snow Leopard 10.6.4. One is a 48GB SSD expresscard and the other is a 250GB internal drive.

    I have OS X on the SSD along with my applications, documents, and desktop folders, while the downloads folder, sites folder, music, photos, etc are all on the original internal drive.

    The setup works great except that draging something out of my downloads folder in into say.. my applications folder copies it from one drive to another rather than moving it. So i have to go and delete the original. Not a huge deal, but an inconvenience. I keep the downloads folder on the internal drive to safe space on the 48GB SSD drive.

    I was wondering if anyone knows of a way to change the default behavior between two drives (and it would be awesome to set on a drive by drive basis) from copying to moving.

    thanks!
     
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  2. Jolly Jimmy, Oct 15, 2010

    Jolly Jimmy macrumors 65816

    Jolly Jimmy

    Joined:
    Dec 13, 2007
    #2
    Hold command while dragging a file to another drive to move it instead of copying.
     
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  3. Boydbme, Oct 15, 2010

    Boydbme thread starter macrumors member

    Boydbme

    Joined:
    Jan 30, 2008
    #3
    Awesome. This helps.

    But does anyone know a way to make this the default action?
     
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  4. Darth.Titan, Oct 15, 2010

    Darth.Titan macrumors 68030

    Darth.Titan

    Joined:
    Oct 31, 2007
    Location:
    Austin, TX
    #4
    Not that I'm aware of. Moving files between different drives automatically triggers a "copy" action in all the OS's I've dealt with. Windows is the same way.

    I'm afraid you'll have to get used to command-dragging.
     
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  5. ulbador, Oct 15, 2010

    ulbador macrumors 68000

    ulbador

    Joined:
    Feb 11, 2010
    #5
    +1 to this. Although I'm almost certain there is a way to override this, you wouldn't want to.

    At the very least, one day it will get you in huge trouble when a file only partially copies or something because then you won't have a copy at all.
     
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  6. Nikonian, Jul 20, 2011

    Nikonian macrumors member

    Nikonian

    Joined:
    Nov 20, 2010
    Location:
    Maine
    #6
    Any progress made on this? It's really frustrating, and in my opinion counter intuitive. I have two drives in my macbook pro and I want it to feel like one single one, not deleting crap constantly. Time machine is for redundancy, this is just asinine.
     
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