How do I turn off path hints in Go To Folder

I am not aware of a preference setting to turn this off.

A possible workaround is to open Terminal and type

open path-to-folder

where of course path-to-folder would be the folder you want.

For example

open /Volumes/thisdrive/thisfolder/thissubfolder

Or you could do a little shortcut so you could select the path, control-click and choose something like "Open in Finder".

The Apple product team has no awareness of your particular Samba server access workflow and although that Go To Folder panel offers Recent paths, there is no feature in Finder or the operating system to disable what was likely intended to be helpful. Microsoft Windows is an entirely different operating system implementation and may actually offer a Samba compatible SMB protocol client that Apple no longer includes in macOS as they do not support GNU GPL3 products.

As aggravating as it may be in your particular case, you will need to live with those Recent suggestions that appear in the Go To Folder panel once you click the ⓧ to dismiss the last used entry.

You can also send direct feedback to the macOS product team too. With the focus on macOS 14 now, do not expect any retroactive fixes to Ventura, or older operating systems.

All I ever see is the last folder accessed. I don't recall it ever being any different.

Are you running the latest version of macOS? You didn't give details on your Mac, but I suggest you update/upgrade to the latest OS your Mac is eligible to run if not already there.

angwe wrote:

Per the footer:

Sorry, those footers aren't useful.

macOS 12.7

Two versions old now. Maybe it is fixed in Sonoma?

there was a recent important security update.

While there may have been a recent update, and there will always be a recent update, don't fall for the security paranoia. That's fake news published by Apple's competitors and social media influencers. It isn't true.

It is possible that this feature is improved in Sonoma. That's not likely, but technically it is possible. It's just that you can't really complain about a feature when using an old version. No one is going to go back and make any changes to old versions unless it is critically important. These days, that only means well-publicized, but still fake, security exploits. It would look bad if Apple didn't fix those. Any time you apply a security update, remember that it one or more functionality bugs that you aren't getting.

It was not a behavior in Catalina or Big Sur. (Part of the reason I want to turn it off is because when it didn't exist as a possibility, I didn't have this problem.)

Apple's software is simply not customizable like that. You could write a script, shortcut, or even an app to quickly open the folder in question. I assume this information must be coming from somewhere. You can embed deep links in that somewhere so that a single click will take you where you want to go.

Don't rely on Apple for this stuff. Apple makes consumer software. Most people using Macs in a business are complaining about one of the many other bugs in Apple's SMB support. It's kind of surprising that a different Apple bug is hampering your usage of SMB. Normally, I recommend that Mac users avoid SMB altogether. While malware is fake news, ransomware is real and there is no better ransomware gateway than SMB. I recommend a content management system like Atlassian Confluence or similar. You can put your links in right there and serve the content over https.

But the fact that this Go To Folder Recents addition didn't exist in Big Sur or Catalina has no bearing on what Apple has changed for Monterey or Big Sur. As I stated, there is no fix for this Recents baggage in Monterey, and you will have to work around it, possibly as etresoft has mentioned in his insightful reply.

If you had a list of publishers, their Samba server folder name, and the particular ISBN subfolder reference number that you are interested in accessing — then you (or rather your technical staff) could dynamically create an SMB path to the publisher/ISBN folder match on your Samba server and go directly to it without even needing the Finder Go To Folder interface. This could be as simply as entering the publisher and ISBN number into a dialog and the rest would be automatic.

For example, you are prompted for publisher_name_or_number and ISBN_no and the rest constructs the following to mount that particular example SMB destination to your Desktop:

smb://admin:password@sambaserver.local/Share/publisher_name_or_number/ISBN_no