Change the Text & Icon Size of the Mac OS X Lion Finder Window Sidebar
Sep 12, 2011 - 7 Comments
If you’ve been busy customizing the Favorites folders and colorizing the Finder sidebar icons, you might want to change the font and icon size of that sidebar text while you’re at it, which has been increased in OS X Lion.
Oddly enough, this isn’t in the “Finder Preferences” or “View Options” where you might expect to find it:
- Open System Preferences and click on “General”
- In the middle of the preference panel, look for “Sidebar icon size” and select one of the three options: Small, Medium, Large
- Changes take effect immediately, close out System Prefs when you are happy with the
Medium is the default in Mac OS X 10.7, which some people feel is too large, but I think this depends entirely on the Macs screen resolution. Small is the default in 10.6, and Large isn’t the default in anything, but it’s quite large and is a great selection for kids or anyone who has vision impairments.
The text size actually doesn’t change with the “Large” selection, but only the icon size. I prefer the small setting, but then again I rarely use the sidebar and hide it most of the time.
Great, but I have a sticky problem. In Snow Leopard I added a couple of custom items to the sidebar. These no longer link to the original locations and I’d like to remove them. However, after the upgrade to Lion they’re stuck and I can’t remove them manually, either by dragging off the sidebar or by the Finder prefs.
I imagine there’s probably a Terminal command to reset the sidebar, or maybe deleting the Finder prefs. Any ideas??
Just hold down the “Command” key and then drag them off, they’ll disappear in a puff like dragging things out of the Dock
It doesn’t solve the problem with me, when you restart the problem appears again. It’s an osx bug and apple have to fix it.
Just right click on it and select “remove from sidebar”.
You might want to check the third bullet point, it’s incomplete.
Thank you for this! I hated the size of the Finder sidebar, and couldn’t find how to make it smaller. It looks really nice with the color Finder sidebar as well.