Finder: Column View Icon Size

Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
Hi!



Does anyone know of any hack or other means to adjust the icon size in the Finder's column view independently of the text size? I usually run Finder in column view with 11 pt text, and the icons are too small to be of much use. Adding an IconSize field to the column view section in the plist doesn't do anything. Even if you don't know of a hack, if you can point me in the right direction for writing one at least I'd have somethign to work with. Thanks.



Grape

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 4
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,309moderator
    It look like they base the icon size off the font size and I'm guessing that's built into the Finder. I doubt there will be an override for it but I can see why you'd want to. At first you think that if you increase the font size big enough the icons do too but then all the names become so big they just turn into a series of dots.



    Maybe you can look at PathFinder and see if that gives you that functionality. Of course you will likely find other issues with PathFinder, it's not as integrated as the Finder is.
  • Reply 2 of 4
    Hmm, thanks for the suggestion, but it doesn't appear that PathFinder does have that option.

    Are there perhaps any third-party add-ons or plug-ins for the Finder or more generally for OS X which would enable this?
  • Reply 3 of 4
    PLEASE HELP! Point me in the right direction for hacking Finder! How do I do it!?
  • Reply 4 of 4
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,309moderator
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Pro Grape


    PLEASE HELP! Point me in the right direction for hacking Finder! How do I do it!?



    There are a couple of things you can do. You can try to see if the Finder will let you what you want by setting some hidden option. This book might help here:



    http://www.amazon.com/Hacking-Mac-OS.../dp/076458345X



    Since you tried this already with the plists, it's likely that the code controlling the behaviour is in the Finder executable and this is very difficult to hack. You'd have to go to /system/library/coreservices and open the Finder folder to get down to the executable, dump this into assembler and try and figure out what part deals with the feature you want and apply some sort of hex patch to the binary.



    Or you can write a simple filebrowser and replace the Finder with it.



    You may also be able to do some on the fly hacking like APE does but this may cause some instability:



    http://www.unsanity.com/



    This is one thing I don't particularly like about some OS X apps. Despite Apple embracing the unix philosophy, they still make very simple tweaks almost impossible to do. Desktop icon spacing for example. We just got it in 10.4.8 I think and it was announced for Leopard but OS X has been out 6 years.



    I don't know why they don't put all configurable options inside the plists and if they want reduce the preferences for people who don't need to customize.
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