You people must think I spend my computer time endlessly clicking on everything, holding down various modifier keys as I go. That’s pretty much true. What’s also true is that more often than not, doing so yields me awesome shortcuts that I didn’t know about before. One of the examples of this is that Command-clicking on the page title in Safari pretty much changed the way I browse, and I’m hoping that this tip will do the same for you. Plus, it doesn’t hurt that you’ll look like a Mac ninja to anyone who’s watching you.
As TMO’s own Jeff Gamet already told us, you can Command-click (or right-click, if you prefer) a Finder window’s title to get a hierarchical view of where you are. It’s like a virtual trail of breadcrumbs leading you back to where you came from.
The neat thing is that this behavior is mimicked all throughout Mac OS X. For example, you can use it in Terminal to find out what your working directory is and where it lies in the hierarchy of your drive.
You can use it in Mail, too. Double-click a message to open it in its own window first, and then use this trick to see what folder that e-mail is in.
It’s also handy in document-creation programs like TextEdit and Pages to figure out where you’ve saved the current file, especially with Lion’s Auto Save feature doing most of the work for you. After all, when it’s been six weeks since you last saved your document, where you originally put it may slip your mind.
But the best implementation of this feature (in my relatively humble opinion, at least) is in Safari. Command- or right-clicking the name of your Web page in the toolbar shows you the hierarchy of the page you’re on, regardless of whether you’ve visited the home page or subsequent pages in the list.
As you can imagine, this is darned useful for navigating through sites and popping into a different place if you need to. It’s much faster than deleting the text you don’t need from the URL bar, that’s for sure! Now go forth, my ninjas, and astonish those who would watch you browse. Just be certain to clear your history first if someone is indeed gonna be watching you, OK?