Sometimes I just want to type a path in Finder, or maybe paste it from somewhere. It can be painful slow to track the right folders 1 by 1. Surprisingly, its difficult to find this little trick via a web search, it seems everyone if focused of displaying the current path at the finder windows and other eye candy stuff, but not productivity.
So, as a reminder to myself and anyone how finds this post, at any Finder window (or a Open/Save File dialog) you can simply use CMD + SHIFT + G and it will show a pop-up where you can type the address you desire.
Obviously the address is a OS X/Unix type of address but it seems you can’t use it to access other protocols, i.e. smb://ip/share_name, to open a file share or ftp://domain.com to browse a FTP destination. I’ve also experienced some bug, in specific applications, where I can’t paste a path in the box, not with CMD + V, but right clicking and selecting Paste from the context menu worked sometimes. Lastly, its a pity that it also won’t prefill the text box with the current path, it would be very handy if you just needed to edit a bit of the path or append something.
Overall, its a nice trick but its a pity that even being a productivity improvement as it is it’s bugs and flaws won’t let it reach it’s maximum potential.
Tags: Finder, OS X, Path, Tricks
You can even tab-complete. Type /App and hit the tab-key to complete it to /Applications.
Go To Folder takes “paths”, not “addresses”, though I suppose abstractly speaking a path is a type of address. (It won’t, for example, take file: URLS, even though those are one-to-one with filesystem paths.)
The box, though, accepts relative paths, though that’s not including the usual “..” for “parent folder”. (That is a problem.) It also supports simple tab completion: type “Mov” while in your home directory and press tab, and it’ll complete to “Movies/”.
Finally, if you have a URL that’s genuinely for a file share of some kind, you can always use the “Connect to Server” box, Cmd-K.