Refresh the Finder

Before Tiger one of the things people complained about the Finder was its lack of a "Refresh" command along the lines of F5 in the Windows Explorer. Supposedly this was fixed in Tiger with automatic refresh, but as we've noted in one of our Ask TUAW columns, sometimes it doesn't quite seem to work. Having had enough of this, Samuel Svensson decided to do something about it and wanted to add a refresh button to the Finder similar to the one in Safari. He wrote this simple application, which is actually just a wrapper around a simple AppleScript:

tell application "Finder"
   tell front window
     update every item with necessity
   end tell
end tell

The nifty part is that it is just a regular application you place in your Applications folder. It merely has a very small icon so that when you drag it onto your Finder toolbar (as we just covered in Mac 101), it looks like a Finder button. In fact, it isn't a hack or plug-in of any sort. Cool idea.

Refresh the Finder is a free download from design firm .

Thanks, Fredrik!

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Source: http://www.soderhavet.com/refresh/

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Before Tiger one of the things people complained about the Finder was its lack of a "Refresh" command along the lines of F5 in the Windows...

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ikurah

Nice, very nice.
There is a similar script for the UP button too
http://www.setupmac.com/addons/finder-up-button/

April 17 2007 at 2:19 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Generally it's not Finder itself that gets stuck, but Spotlight's metadata cache: I find this especially after unzipping files (BOMArchiveHelper or The Unarchiver will do the unzip, and Finder will tell me the resultant folder's emptyâ€”even though the terminal says files are there). Usually involves a manual â€˜mdimportâ€™Â to get it going, or copying the folder to a new one from the command-line. I've a feeling refreshing Finder wouldn't help in these situations.

April 16 2007 at 7:41 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Scott

I usually just hit the Finder's Back button, then the Forward button, and the display refreshes.

April 16 2007 at 3:33 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Chad

Very nice idea. I have not seen anyone integrate with the finder toolbar in this way. Simple, but effective.

April 16 2007 at 1:46 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Vincent

The one thing where I have needed it is on networked drives. It's annoying to have to eject and re-attach a networked drive to see if anything has changed. I hope this does the trick for that.

April 16 2007 at 1:34 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Clark Goble

I thought with 10.4 you didn't need to do a refresh. New files automatically refresh the Finder. I used a script like this a lot in 10.3 but haven't had a need for it sense as long as I can recall.

April 16 2007 at 1:28 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

cappy

I've been using this Contextual Menu plugin for a while now. Works like a charm.
http://www.brockerhoff.net/nudge/

April 16 2007 at 12:12 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply