Reveal Finder Location of Recent Items by Holding Down Command Key

You can easily reveal the Finder location of any recently used item from the Apple “Recent Items” menu by holding down the Command key as you access the Apple menu of OS X.

The attached screenshots demonstrate this tip in action. It works from all apps since it’s part of a system-wide function.

The secret is to hold down the command key when you first click the  Apple menu, then when you go to “Recent Items” menu options you will find a “Show (name) in Finder”. Selecting the recent item while continuing to hold down the Command key then goes directly to that item within the OS X file system.

This is an incredibly useful feature if you just saved something but can’t recall quite where you saved it, as you can quickly retrieve the item with this trick.

Note that this seems to only work in versions of Mac OS X beyond 10.6, so if you’re on an older version the option will likely be unavailable.

You must have recent items enabled to have this feature in Mac OS X, but the feature and reveal trick remains in all versions of OS X, including 10.9, 10.10, and 10.11. In fact, the latest versions of OS X improve on this feature even further by expanding it to all recent items shown, including servers, applications, documents, and anything else opened, allowing users to jump to the containing folder instantly.