Alternative Finder "New Folder"
One of the annoyances of Mac OS X is the behaviour of the "New folder" action in Finder.
Finder creates new folders at the root level of the focused window and, while this location is fine for many situations, it is not for other: what I expect when I have selected one of the folders on the list/tree and ask Finder to create a new one, is having the new folder created under my selection.
It would be nice having an alternative behaviour which could work according to these rules:
- If a folder on the desktop is selected, the new folder will be created on the desktop (that is, like in the original behaviour).
- If a folder not on the desktop is selected, the new folder will be created under that folder and it will become the selected folder.
- In other case, it will behave like the original action.
Now for the technical part. The solution I'm presenting is a combination of AppleScript and the power of a fantastic automation tool called QuicKeys, which I would recommend to anyone.
The main reason why such a tool is required is the limitation of AppleScript in terms of sending keystrokes to inactive applications. We will also be using this tool to assign a global hotkey for trigger the execution of the script with the version of the "New folder" action.
The rest is self-explained in the image below. As you can see, I assigned the (⌥N) hot key to a QuicKeys shortcut which executes a sequence of three steps:
- Execute a snippet of AppleScript to create the folder according to the new behaviour if possible. For any other case the AppleScript could not manage properly (i.e. determining which is the current active and focused window in Finder), tell QuicKeys to jump to step 3 so we can fallback on the original Finder behaviour.
- Type keystroke to start renaming the newly created folder and stop the flow, we're done.
- Type keystroke to invoke the Finder original "New folder" action for thoses cases not properly managed in step 1.
That's all. Suggestions and comments, specially about other (hopefully easier) approaches, are very welcome.
