Finder pathname display cluttered due to triangles and folder icons.

For many years now I have been perturbed by the pathnames displayed at the bottom of the finder window. Instead of following standard Unix conventions and seperating each pathname component with a slash, each is separated by a GUI-like representation of an office type folder.

There have been more than a few times that a long pathname becomes so jumbled that I cannot make it out! Spotlight is somewhat better as it has small flyout like triangles instead of file folders, but then the pathname goes away as soon as one lets loose of the keystrokes necessary to force spotlight to display the pathname.

This makes more difficult than it should be when a developer needs to navigate Terminal to a file buried deeply in the file hierarchy.

Temporary fix? Determine location of the the gif/png/jpg's used by 'folder' . Move it aside and then link in a picture of a slash?

Gowing forward, include a preference items which would allow users to select their own seperators and pathname display font. Perhaps spotlight could always display the pathname, and CMD+OPTION-whatever would copy pathname into a paste buffer. Of course, the pathname would be a 100% genuine Unix style pathname (at this point) so that users could paste it into terminal and go directly to the file of interest. It would be nice if a keyboard shortcut existed to do the same thing with the finder pathname.

Can anybody help me with the names and locations of the jpegs / gifs used by folder and spotlight? Would a file monitor be usefull in tracking down these two items?

ps A copy of this was originally posted in the Imac forum. I meant to post it here. Forgive the duplicate post.