Clicking Finder Icon in Dock Doesn't Open New Finder Window

I had the same issue on 10.7.1 about a month after installing Lion. I also found that clicking Trash in the dock did not open the Trash window (as noted in another thread).

Using Disk Utility, I repaired permissions on my startup volume. Then I rebooted the Mac. That seems to have fixed both issues.

See if that works for you.

Go to Users/yourhome/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist delete that file and then restart.

*Note to get to the Library folder go to your "Go" menu and hold option key

There is no permissions issue here, I think what worked for you was the restart.

I would have thought so too (that restart did it), except that I had already restarted at least once and the issues persisted. I'm not saying that I know that permissions fixed it, but that's about all I did between restarts. Disk Utility did show several fixes. Anyway, I agree that restarting should be tried first for these sorts of issues.

I'm also experiencing the issue where a normal left-click on the Finder icond in the dock does nothing. I'm running Lion 10.7.4. I'll try the preferences delete suggestion, but restarting didn't seem to work. Any other suggestions to get it to work?

Open Terminal, type

killall Dock

and press 'return' on the keyboard.

That will solve the issue temporarily. But to fix it permanently you need to go find the 3rd party software that is causing the conflict, probably in your Login Items if a restart didn't fix it. Look here:

 > System Preferences... > Users & Groups | Login Items

Likely suspects are things like

Total Spaces

Path Finder

BetterTouchTool

BetterFinder

but the list of possibilities is endless. Easiset thing to do is just remove EVERYTHING from your login items.

Hi softwater,

Thank you for the suggestions and tips. I entered the terminal command and the Dock vanished, then re-appeared. But the issue wasn't fixed--even temporarily. I am also experiencing the same issue with the Trashcan icon. I will try removing the login items and see if that fixes something. I can't restart my system now as I am in the middle of completing a task.

Thanks again for your time and help!

Moving the login items on its own won't fix anything until you do a restart afterwards.

If that doesn't help, then as soon as you can you should restart your mac in Safe Mode and see if the issue persists.

To start in Safe Mode, restart your mac while holding down the shift key until you see the grey screen with the  logo and a progress bar underneath it. When the progress bar completes, log in to your normal account and test.

I ended up having to kill the WindowServer process to resolve this. Killing Dock and Finder numerous times didn't change the broken behaviour. Be warned though, most user application are children of WindowProcess, hence it pretty much kills all your open applications - that probably has something to do with why it works.

Had I used `pstree` I may have been able to finder Finder's direct parent and kill it. I believe "mdworker" is typically Finder's parent process.

I'm having this problem on Yosemite 10.10.3, and never before.

The finder window won't open when i click the dock icon. But work if i right click and choose new finder window.

It's annoying but i can work.

Yes, same issue here 10.10.3. I suggest using the feedback assistant, so they can fix it for release.

Yeah, i already did that!

😉

I did the same thing too.

I also encountered this problem in Yosemite (and never before). Deleting Users/yourhome/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist (as instructed by macjack above) worked for me. Though if the problem repeats, there may be a bug in Yosemite causing it, but at least for me this seemed to fix the issue...

Deleting a preference .plist may work sometimes, and has been common practice in the past, but has never been officially supported by Apple* and can lead to unexpected results (not usually serious), especially on 10.8 (Mountain Lion) and above. The generally recommended way to clear preferences is the command-line defaults command in the Terminal, if you are comfortable using it. In this case, that command would be: defaults delete com.apple.finder

*If you are shocked to hear this (as I was a couple years ago), here's the official word--read the paragraph under "CFPreferences Plist Files." (in developer-speak, "private implementation detail" means "you may not rely on this.")