"Name" portion of my Finder windows too long

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.

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

Hi Alex,

I tried out your suggestion, but it doesn't work for me at all. It's just one of many bugs i have since updating to Mac OS 10.9. Other issues are that finder and itunes windows suddenly will not scroll any more until i restart. The same thing happens with drag and drop functionality. I'm waiting for updates and consider 10.9 to be still quite buggy.

Greetings Andreas

Having the exact same issue since OSX 10.9

So far no fixes after 3 months.

Together with all the other bugs that were introduced with OSX 10.9 I feel assured to say that Windows Vista was a clean OS compared to this seemingly alpha version of an OS.

I had the same problem after upgrading to Mavericks. For me the most frustrating thing was the "Size" column getting too small, making it impossible to see folder sizes at a glance. I seem to have found a fix by:

1. option-dragging the name column to be very small - about half of what I actually want.

2. option-dragging the date and size columns to the size that I want - and leaving about an inch of space between the right-most column and the right side of the window.

3. closing the window

After that, reopening the window results in the date and size columns "stuck" to the right side of the window and at reasonable widths and the name column is fluid depending on the window size. Not bad.

I can confirm this is a new bug w/ Mavericks...I didn't experience it in Lion or Mountain Lion. Now after a couple upgrades and a fresh install I can definitely verify that I continue to see this popup.

I tried Alex's suggestion of changing and making defaults at the root HD level but still experiencing the same behavior. Also tried collapsing all folders-->cmd+A, and setting defaults that way to no avail.

This solved it for me. If I was paranoid, I would say it was some creepy way of forcing us to have a "tags" column in all our finder windows so we can learn to tag everything. Tags are great, why aren't you using them?

Or just that the mac programmers love tags so much they've never opened a finder window without the TAG column?

:-)

The full-screen toggle doesn't work too great if using TotalFinder tabs. Also, it's quite slow.

I wrote the following AppleScript that solves the issue. Whenever the column width is too wide, just run this and it'll force Finder to fluidly resize the columns by making the window really wide, then resizing it back to the original size.

tell application "Finder"

tell the front Finder window

-- get the current bounds of the finder window

set b to the bounds

-- create a really wide window

set the bounds to {42, -7, 3000, 600}

-- set window back to its original size

set the bounds to b

end tell

end tell

Of course, this will work better if bound to a keyboard shortcut. I personally bound it to CMD + E using BetterTouch Tool. I wrote a blog post about this in case you need more information. http://christianvarga.com/2014/01/fix-finder-name-column-width-bug-osx-mavericks /

Same problem here...

As a Mac user since 1986, it really galls me that the Finder today has a *less* intuitive interface, *fewer* common applications keyboard shortcuts, and *more* interface snafus than way back then. Lets face it Apple is become a new Microsoft.

Which means that its time to find the new startup that smashes the big screen with big brother on it, because they do things better.

Apple has just gradually become less awful than Microsoft.