Reveal currently open files in Mac OS X

28 Jun 2008

Something I noticed completely by accident today when I clicked on the titlebar of QuickTime Player today with the Cmd key held down. The “titlebar” is this thing here – I’m not sure that’s the right name for it:

Anyway, if you hold down the Cmd key (aka the Apple key), a menu pops up that shows the folder hierarchy of where the currently opened QuickTime movie is in your filesystem:

$QuickTime Player with \"Reveal file\" menu$

This works in all Mac apps that display the filename of the currently open/focused file in the titlebar.

It’s useful for me since my NADD means I try to close as many unused windows as possible to adhere to my Cmd-Tab diet – now I can close Finder windows after opening files and be sure that I can get back to them quickly. What about QuickSilver? Yup, I do use (and love) QuickSilver but I don’t let it catalog every single file!

Another nice thing about this is that I can easily reveal files in Finder in my favorite text editor (TextMate) without needing to use the project drawer:

$TextMate with \"Reveal file\" menu$

4 Responses to Reveal currently open files in Mac OS X

Sho

June 28th, 2008 at 2pm

Great tip – I knew it but good to be reminded.

Another good one, although you probably know this one too, is to click and hold on the file’s icon – then you can drag it whereever, further obviating the need for Finder. I do this all the time to, say, drag a file from textmate to CSSEdit, or drag a static page to Firefox or something.