TUAW Tip: Take control of your sidebar

Andy: icon and font size in the Sidebar reduces itself proportional to the number of items in it.

There's also SideTrash.

21 - Thanks, I was being thick then lol

Here's what I wanna know about the Sidebar:

Is there any way to give it the keyboard focus so I can use the up/down arrows and return key to select an item?

Anyone know?

"I may be a bit thick here but how do you get your icons that small in the sidebar?"

Andy, the Finder automatically resizes sidebar icons -- within certain limits -- to fit in the current window size. So at a given window size, the more items you have in your sidebar, the smaller their icons will be. (Or, conversely, by reducing the size of a Finder window, you also reduce the size of sidebar icons.) However, there is a minimum size; once the window gets too small, the sidebar will become a scrolling list.

Fixed my script to work around predictable but wrong column view behavior.

---
on open these_items
tell application "Finder" to delete every item of these_items
end open

on run
set TrashPath to path to trash from user domain
tell application "Finder"
set FileSelection to selection
set CurrentTarget to target of window 1
set SelectionCount to count of FileSelection
if SelectionCount = 0 then
open TrashPath
else if (item 1 of FileSelection) ≠ CurrentTarget then
delete every item of FileSelection
else if (item 1 of FileSelection) = CurrentTarget and current view of window 1 = column view then
set FolderName to name of item 1 of FileSelection
display alert "Delete "" & FolderName & ""?" message "Due to a column view limitation would you like to delete "" & FolderName & "" or do nothing?" as warning buttons {"Cancel", "Delete"} default button "Delete" cancel button "Cancel"
if button returned of the result is "Delete" then
delete every item of FileSelection
end if
end if
end tell
end run
---

I spotlighted ".trash" and dragged the result into the sidebar. I hit "apple + i" to get info. Then, I renamed the item from ".trash" to "trash". Also, I changed the image from the bland photo to a .jpeg of a wire waste basket. It appeared to work- I could drag items into the trash from the finder. However, I cannot empty trash anymore. I have tried emptying the trash from the dock icon, in the finder, and from finder dropdown window. I am rather anxious that I inadvertantly harmed my computer, for the inability to empty trash is rather bothersome, and perhaps it has as yet unknown implications. Please, can someone help me? (P.S. I tried renaming it ".trash" but that is restricted, as ".trash" is reserved by the system. Please, please, please help me. Thank you in advance.

This can be done easier: just creat a symbolic link with

ln -s ~/.Trash Trashbin

or something like that and drag it to the side.

this applescript actually proved to be harmful to me: i was deleting objects in my 'downloads' folder, when i got a message that some objects couldn't be deleted because they were already in trash. i didn't believe it, opened the trash folder (from the dock), and indeed, the files didn't show in the list. i couldn't move the files into the trash manually either, so i decided to empty the trash. just to see that my whole downloads folder was gone. it wasn't shown in the trash folder either. couldn't recover the files, had a backup from a couple of weeks ago, though. :(

James: Very cool! Thanks for posting it.