how can i make 'hide toolbar' the default in finder

Found a brute force way of this which walks a tight rope.

First,close all of your Finder windows. Then delete all the hidden files named ".DS_Store" on every hard disk (volume) you have. Then open a finder window on each disk, hide the toolbar with Command-Shift-T, then close the Finder window. After this, your default view for that disk becomes that last view you saw. You have to do this for each disk which is kind of a pain but better than the "open folder, press command-shift-T" for every bloody folder.

To do this via Terminal...

1) Close all Finder windows (hold option key, close one of them)

2) use SpotLight to find "Terminal" and launch Terminal

3) type

cd

and a space in the terminal window after the ">" prompt appears

4) drag and drop a hard disk into the Terminal window after the "cd ". This puts the "path" name in there...

5) press return. This sets the default folder location for Terminal (default directory) to the hard disk

6) run this command (copy and paste it into terminal, press return after pasting)

sudo find . -name '*.DS_Store' -type f -delete

7) when prompted, enter your administrator account password (yes, you need to be admin, sorry)

This will take a long time if you have a big disk, lots of folders, etc. The square 1970's terminal cursor will sit there and blink under the "P" in the word "Password" for quite a while. (shades of the original "Tron" movie). There may be a couple of errors spit out by this command line tool, don't worry it continues on riding it's little light cycle through your hard disk wacking only the ".DS_Store" files as it goes. The program named "find" will be eating quite a bit of processor if you are into checking on that sort of thing with Activity Monitor or another Terminal window with "top".

At the end you will have your display looking something like this (without all the red ink):

You need to repeat for each disk you have. Be aware that if you set the view to the "show toolbar" and then open a new folder below, that button junk-loaded window view default starts to take root again and spreads. (technically it's not a virus but it sure acts like one).

I had done that before but it seemed like I was still stuck hitting that command-shift-T all the time. I figured out the brute force method I just posted too but not universal... Makeing a new folder on the desktop it comes up showing the toolbar etc.

Wish I coud just turn that off entirely. If I never saw it again, it would be ocular relef!

Neither your solution or my solution really works. The moment I use Spotlight to find something in a folder on disk (and I use it all day long) I get the same bunch of junk all over the Finder window and have to hit command shift T to get rid of it. Opening another disk is defaulted to Show Toolbar and that bleeds over to the next thing opened.

And then when I open another folder, it is now back into the Show Toolbar mode again. It is like a virus.

It is like Microsoft's approach to putting more buttons and menus all over hte place to obscure the content which is the focus of the mission. I can only imagine that the desks of these "designers" that force this either only ever have on thing on them (aka one finder window) or are a complete mess of tools all over the desk with no work surface.

Make the bad man stop!

Found the setting for ShowToolbar in the preferences:

~/library/preferences/com.apple.finder.plist

and there are any number of showsidebar and showtoolbar that in theory you could turn off.. but the *@%$% system keeps on turning them back on. Why they are there is anybody's guess : why have a setting that just gets overwritten?

As part of the research, here is a grep search and replace pattern to use to change all of the infernal "true" to "false" for any ShowSideBar or ShowToolBar in the file:

Find:

Show([sidetool]*)bar</key>\r([\t]*)<true/>

Replace:

Show\1bar</key>\r\2<false/>

(hint, TextWrangler is your friend)

I kill the finder. I then go in and modify the ~/library/preferences/com.apple.finder.plist file to have nothing but false for showing any toolbar or sidebar, then I safe the prefs file (using TextWrangler.

Then I close and re-open the text file, it is all set the way I want values to false.

Then I relaunch the Finder and check the prefs file, all is still the way I left it.

Then I create a folder on the desktop.

Then I check the prefs file, 18 of the values have now been changed to True.

This seems to be a write-only preference? Seriously?