Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT
When I open most (but not all) Finder windows, the Name section is extremely long, even when the names in the directory or folder are very short.
Does anyone know a way to reset or define the width of the name column? The other columns seem fine.
OS X Mavericks (10.9), 2008 MP 3.2gHz; 20GB RAM
Cick and drag the bottom right corner of the Finder window to the left.
They we're right, adjust column width and THEN adjust the windowsize to let it "sink in", make the Finder understand what you want. Close the window, f.e. Applications (shift-cmd-a) and column width is as you'd like them...
That TOTALLY worked. Option click and drag. The next window I opened was the fixed size. Using 10.10.5.
I'm absolutely amazed how many things that worked well years ago in OSX (Panther, Tiger, SnowLeopard, ...) don't work anymore.
OSX is harder to use, less intuitive, less colorful, and less productive.
Honestly, the only thing keeping me with Apple today (I've ditched the iPhone) is good hardware and the fact the its the only high volume production OS with Unix underneath the hood. If somebody were to make a NEXT-like machine with Unix, or something similar, I'd probably give it a try.
Thank you so much Alex. It's still a bit of a wonky fix, but doing as you suggest has made it a much less annoying issue for me.
Rebecca
PS I love they way they marked Michael's temporary fix "solved"! Kind of obnoxious.
Installing XtraFinder (a free plug in to add functionality to Finder) solved this problem 100%. Did I mention that it is FREE?
In the settings there is an option to simply 'tick', which automatically adjusts the columns widths to fit the window size. It also allows the user to specify a given width for the Names column.
https://www.trankynam.com/xtrafinder/
Summary of Failed attempts (Mavericks):
Readjusting the size of the columns manually (holding the 'alt' key or not!) does have persistence, like people have mentioned, but only for THAT specific folder where you have adjusted it, so any new folders you make or folders that you haven't visited before still have the default column widths that are too wide.
I noticed this problem started for me when I used a montor with a much higher resolution than my MBP.
I have played around with the 'com.apple.finder.plist' file found in "/Users/your_user_name/Library/Preferences/", because this file should dictate the default columns widths and other parameters, however Finder appears have the incorrect values cached, or at least isn't paying attention to that file.
I did try deleting all the hidden '.DS_Store' files for every folder before too, but that also failed.
"Name" portion of my Finder windows too long
