"Name" portion of my Finder windows too long

I'm experiencing the same problem. I've tried the suggestions that have been made in this thread and none have helped in any meaningful way.

It certainly looks like a bug to me.

I can confirm that this "fixes" the problem. Although manually resizing the Name column does basically the same thing.

The reason that this gets reverted eventually is because you manually increase the width of the window while viewing a specific folder. The next time you open that same folder and the window width is smaller than the last time, then the columns will be wider due to this, and therefore you get a horizontal scrollbar.

I'm not sure what you mean in this comment. I think we are talking about the same bug but in different contexts. I never said it WASN'T a bug, but I was describing how the bug worked, at least for me. It is a consistent bug in my case, and I can reproduce it. I know why Mac chose to do this, but yes it is a bug, but the intended behavior itself is not a bug. Essentially, Mavericks wants to always have the columns completely fill up the horizontal width of the current Finder window so that there is no wasted space, but this had the unfortunate side effect of always using the previous column widths, so if the Finder window was now smaller, then the columns would be wider than the width.

Okay, I believe I found a fix to this issue that has been driving me nuts too. I tried the plist tactics (and a couple other more in-depth things to no avail), but decided to keep this simple. With 10.9, where has apple done the tinkering? Well, in Finder, we now have tabs (which I thought would be great, but they don't do what I need, such as always opening in a set of tabs should I desire that) ... and they did all these supposedly earth-shattering wonders with TAGS. So I figured this column issue needed to be resolved where they "fixed" what wasn't broke in the first place. Try this:

If you're like me, your LIST VIEW is likely name, date, size, kind and what we want is the date column over to the name column by default like it used to be and which is something even windows users enjoy, but it keeps zapping out to interstellar space or even disappearing from view. SO: to the right of your RIGHT-MOST column, add TAGS (right click on the column headings, select TAGS) even though you will never use it, but what it will do is force the ancillary columns leftward closer to the NAME column. Now size you window to how you more or less usually would view it; now size the columns so they are nice. Right-click to VIEW OPTIONS, and make it default. Of course it won't because Apple has never got the hang of that word default when it comes to finder, but it will make it default of that folder. So if you repeat this strategy for your main folders of use, the problem will more or less be solved. (NOTE: If it doesn't work to perfection, you can add yet an additional column -- I did Comments -- to the right of Tags -- and this will force enough crap on the far so right that your view to the right of NAME remains sane. This is not, in my opinion an acceptable fix from the standpoint of what used to be Mac awesomeness, but ... it works.)

(Side note: Has anyone noticed what a real sheisse-show this Mavericks is? Nothing drastic, but lots of little buggy appearances on the scene ... like keyboard defaults that don't stick upon restart or the inability to space off of an embedded image in mail. Oh, let's not start with mail ... All things I can live with, but all extra steps! All things I have helped my windows clients with for years and now these annoyances are really creeping into the mac os. Oh well.)

I have been experimenting further since my last post and I am beginning to wonder whether font size might have something to do with this.

My Finder has the default text size set to 11. Whenever the name column mysteriously becomes extremely wide, I have found that the text size for those folders is set to 12. It is like the defaults are not getting applied.

Each time this has been happening I have opened View Options and have set the text size back to 11 and have ticked 'Always open in list view' and 'Browse in list view'. Since I have begun doing this I have been seeing fewer wide name columns.

I wonder if I keep going, I might track down all of them eventually?

The other thing I have noticed in Mavericks is that Finder seems quite keen to fit all of the columns into the available space. Columns on the right side lock themselves to the edge of the window. If you make a Finder window wide and then narrow again you might see this happening. But then Finder seems caught between two very different ideas: column widths are individually precisely set — versus column widths being determined as a percentage of the available space.

Another new thing in Mavericks is full screen Finder windows.

My suspicion is that this bug is related to the combination of the new column sizing approach and the support for full screen Finder windows.

For what it's worth, I'm experiencing the same bug as the OP.

If one only uses the Name column in a given finder window, I assume that option-dragging the divider isn't an option, if you'll pardon the pun?

also - anyway to make it to move back a folder with three finger swipe?

Also having this issue - incredibly annoying! Name field is consistently way way too long.

I found a work-around somewhere.

Once you change the column sizes to what you like, close finder.

Once you reopen, it should be resized as you like.

Notes:

1) you must have all other finder windows/tabs closed so that the one you are resizing is the last one closed.

2) sometimes I find I have to change something else in the window for the resizes to be saved. e.g. Tag something

This doesn't work for me.