"Name" portion of my Finder windows too long

I wound up doing a fresh install of all my Macs, manually restoring data and avoiding any restores. Finder name columns in list view is behaving a lot better now, but finding little bombs here and there as I got to places locally and on the network that were last accessed by my old installs.

Actually, I'm finding the OS a lot better after doing a fresh install. Hope that the upgrade to Yosemite isn't such a disaster like upgrading from .8 to .9.

I do remember bragging to my windows friends how Mac updates were flawless. Down to the last webpage I was on.

Give the fresh install a try or wait for .10. I'm even using Mail.app again, albeit minus any gmail accounts.

I actually just recently got a new MBP, and got the chance to try new OSX install twice (the first SDD broke with 2 weeks of usage).

Both installs had the same finder tab problem. Also the same issue is on the iMac I have. And on all colleagues' Macs as well.

Doesn't really encourage me to try a reinstall. So I guess I'll just wait for Yosemite and hope for the best.

Also now that MS lays off people, maybe Apple can catch someone who knows a thing or two about adjusting columns' widths 😉

LOL.. there are certainly some features from Windows File Explorer that I would love to see in Finder. Most notably it's networking features. Very strong network mapping features. Ability to backup favorites or store in the network. Speed... Windows File Explorer is super quick.

Sorry to hear about the issues you are having, hopefully some of the guys who post often in here don't see your post, they will be quick to say it's all your fault because in their studios, all their macs are perfect, with zero issues and all of us with this issue are having personal problems.

Hope Yosemite resolves this... it's a big worry of mine that it will start to happen again on my macs after I did a lot of work to resolve this.

My beef with this issue is that I am always sorting my Finder views by Date Modified. However, the Date Modified column is ALWAYS outside the Finder window, be it a standard Finder window, an Open or Save/Save As... dialog. I always have to manually resize everything to access the Data Modified (or any other) column, other than the Name column, which is always too long.

No matter what I do in View Options or press the Use As Defaults setting button, nothing seems to stick.

OS X 10.9.4

I experienced the problem today and decided to fix it. Found the blog and did not see a straight forward solution so accept the apology if this was somewhere in the long thread already.

In FINDER set the columns and tabs exactly like you want them in list view.

Use Option to Drag the column width.

My font size is 16 but this is just a preference.

Use SHOW VIEW OPTIONS and even add some column headings you rarely will use.

Now REARRANGE the columns so they are even in the order you need. (name cannot move)

* also under all my files area NAME is not a heading so this one window may result differently.

Once completed DO NOT shut the finder window. Open ACTIVITY MONITOR from utilities

Quit Finder ... not force quit

From Dock click Finder to bring its respawn to front.

Verify the changes took place.

If not repeat above (in case another finder task was running on the first try.)

If YES then toggle FULL SCREEN then try a couple sizes to verify the change fully took.

If any of the sizes don't show the change, option fix it like before, click set as default, activity monitor stop it again.

This has worked for me using MAVERICKS 10.9.4 to resize the column widths in Finder

-Paul v

an avid mac user

Due to my schedule constraints this is the first time I had sufficient time to root this out. Sorry for the delay.

This seems to work fine especially taking the advice to perform the action again if it fails first time.

2nd time it worked a treat.

However going to full screen sees the name column widen once again. Upon reducing from full screen the folder resizes nicely.

Even Option dragging and doing the finder quit and relaunch (in activity monitor) several times makes no difference to the full screen look.

I'm happy with this anyway. Now that we have struggled and cursed with this bug for ages now, no doubt an Apple fix will probably be minutes away.

Sometimes I reckon their techs need to head out into the burbs and deal with real life set ups. Not those that populate their pristine labs.

(PS - the finder situation suits me for now - I am yet to to test it from a reboot)

gfingersc

Be very very careful with the bug word... big brother is watching and reading!

Things have been much better since my re-install. I still run into areas of my file system that have long columns in list view that run off the screen, it's much less common now, still don't know the cause. In my 14 years on the mac, have never seen anything like this odd behavior.

Wish I had one of those picture perfect labs or studios where there is never a single issue and or person 😉

Oh the "B*g" word eh?

Well if it acts like one maybe it is one!

Anyway I hope BB is watching and reading - as well as reading and fixing. That's all we mere consumers can hope for.

gfingersc

Yeah the full screen does not take the change. Glad I rarely need that view. This Mac has been rebooted several times since that change and it has remained fixed. Hope your troubles are far and your wildest dreams come true.

Thanks, LEVYMETAL, the script worked for me beautifully.

Used Keyboard Maestro's "Execute Applescript" macro function.

Thanks Paulv_itworks for your effort. This fix seems to work for a single folder. However, as soon as I switch from, for example, "Documents" to "Downloads", the columns' settings are "gone" and name column is too wide again. I tried setting the root HD folder, in hopes the settings would be inherited to other folders, but no luck there.

Update

Looks like what it takes, is to delete all .DS_Store files from OSX and, then set the default settings

(they are not applied for folders which have their own settings stored in a .DS_Store -file).

I used this command to remove the files and kill Finder (OSX Mavericks): "sudo find / -name .DS_Store -delete; killall Finder" (use at your own risk).

I have the same problem, however, with the names of local drives. Remote drives open correctly. E.g. If I want to attach a file to a mail, the window open in the full width of the screen whatever the width of the mail window is. The mail window is pushed to the center of the screen. How nice to have an undocumented feature for centering documents.

I never managed to tame this super annoying "feature" of Mavericks.

My solution was to install XtraFinder. No I can set the width to "Automatically adjust the width of columns" and type in a max width for each column.

Campox...found the answer, and it is better than mine which was to just add a bunch of other things to the view options, which inevitably shrank the name.

Just hold option when you shrink the name field. That's it.