Today I’m going to show you how to add a new item to that Finder sidebar. For some reason Apple does not include a link to the Trash but to everything else. Well today I will fix that and save you some time in the future. Ok, so lets get started.
- Open up the terminal because we need to view hidden folders in Leopard for the moment.
- Type “defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES”
- then hold your option key and right-click on the finder icon located in your dock. Hit the relaunch.
- Now open finder and you will see files that are somewhat transparents or files that begin with “.”.
- Now in fider type “cmd+shift+g” all at once and finder will ask you what folder, type “~/.”
- Once you hit that you will see a folder called “.Trash” just drag that icon in into the sidebar. Even though the icon is transparent in the finder it looks alright on the sidebar so dont worry about finding a new icon.
- Now just enter the terminal again and hit up to bring what you typed back up and take out “YES” and type “NO”. This will take the files back to hidden.
BTW you could rename it to take out that period but you would have to first create a new .trash and create a symbolic link to the new .trash for the sidebar icon to work. Enjoy
March 3rd, 2008 at 7:09 pm
How do you make a “symbolic link to the new .trash”?
(that would really help)
April 19th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
I made a symbolic link, using this Contextual Menu item plugin:
http://seiryu.home.comcast.net/~seiryu/symboliclinker.html
However, even with that created and dragged to the sidebar, it shows up as “.Trash” with the period. I am also unable to assign a nicer looking icon. It remains the generic folder.
July 3rd, 2008 at 12:37 am
Here’s another way that will work with all volumes, not just the Boot volume
http://www.tuaw.com/2006/02/03/tuaw-tip-take-control-of-your-sidebar/