Sillyness, werd

Navigating hidden folders via the Finder

For some people this will be a no-brainer, but for the new mac user, or non-power user this tip will be a life saver.

Have you ever needed to navigate to a hidden folder via the Finder, or worse yet from somewhere like System Preferences?  Lets say you are following along with my SVN tutorial, and you have gotten as far as to install SVN and scplugin, and now you are on the scplugin System Preference pane and need to ‘open’ your svn executable.

The only problem of course is that SVN was installed to /usr/local/bin/ and that is not accessible via the Finder.  What is a mac faithful to do?  The answer is surprisingly simple, in fact I can outline it in 3 easy steps:

1. Click ‘open’ on the scplugin Preference pane
2. When the Finder dialog opens perform a shift-command(apple)-g to bring up the Go To Folder… dialog.
3. Type in /usr/local/bin into this dialog and press return.

And thats it, the open dialog should have moved to /usr/local/bin/ and you will be able to select the SVN executable.

Still sound confusing?  I recorded a little video of the whole process for you to watch, and you can find it here.