Can we colour Finder windows?

Only Icon view can have the background customized, but in icon view you can not only change the color, you can use a photo if you prefer. Open a folder and make sure it is set to icon view (View menu or icons in the folder's tool bar). Then select View menu > Show View Options (or Command-J), and select Color or Picture. In this example, I dragged a picture into the options pane:

More info: Change how folders are displayed in the Finder on Mac – Apple Support

It's in the View Options dialog box because that enables you to customize each folder independently, as opposed to a Finder-wide setting. So I can have an image of plated food as the background for my Recipes folder, an image of Uncle Sam for my taxes folder, a green background for my nature photos folder, etc.

You can shade/colorize the background of 'active' part of the Finder window, the part behind the icons... just like you can colorize the background of a Keynote slide or the cells in a Numbers spreadsheet. You cannot set the fill color for the toolbars in Finder or in Keynote/Numbers.

Yes, we can add color to Finder windows if you have selected icon view.

To change the background color of a folder window, open the folder in Icon View, then go to the View menu > Show View Options to pick a custom background color.

rhone1 wrote:

Can we colour Finder windows?

We cannot.

With all the graphical changes made for decades, how come there is no easy way to mitigate the stark whiteness of open Finder windows?

The Finder is ancient. It has few display adjustments. You can use dark mode and then it won't be stark white. You can use list mode and each row will have alternating colours.

I spend almost all day, 7-days a week in front of my 32-in display and I go to extreme lengths to avoid eyestrain. When one chooses System Settings > Appearance > Dark, the Finder window, regardless of its View selection has a black background.

I have never set any Finder Window background to a specific color or image. Too distracting.

I have never set any Finder Window background to a specific color or image.

Developers have used background images to display the drag-and-drop instructions from within a .dmg disk image. I always thought that was a simple but pretty neat use of that feature.

neuroanatomist wrote:

Indeed. I remember using it on my 1987 Macintosh SE, and it really hasn't changed too much since then.

Love the "DA Handler". That architecture hasn't changed much. System Extensions still use it.

But it was really cool when MultiFinder came out!

I remember those early days of multitasking. People trashed the Mac because it used a cooperative threading model. Then it got all advanced with pre-emptive threading. And then we had Unix with multiprocessing. And now the hippest thing is once again cooperative threading.

The recipe looks good!

etresoft wrote:

The Finder is ancient.

Indeed. I remember using it on my 1987 Macintosh SE, and it really hasn't changed too much since then.

But it was really cool when MultiFinder came out!