Best way to create a floating menu to easier reach out for 20+ folders?

Discussion & Questions
1

Hi.

on macOS Sonoma I have in Finder on my favorite documents and projects a folder structure which goes 4-5 levels deep, dozen of folders inside. And many times a day I have to think about, how to find and reach that or this folder. My problem is, using Spotlight shows all documents at once and every time I must tell Finder to show only Folders, this becomes very unhandy after a while.

My idea was to build a floating menu, opened via FN+S, displaying me an equivalent of these 4-5 levels but with only the most used folders. If a folder on level 3 contains these 5 folders "rarley used" "rarley used" "rarley used" "rarley used" "often used" I would put in the floating menu structure only the often used one.

Before I start from scratch, I'd like to ask how you would think about this problem? So I do not waste time in building a zombie I won't use :smile: :sweat_smile:

2

I'm not sure whether a floating menu is the best way to that. Personally I have something like this in my Dock. You can drag any folder there and even navigate it

1 Like
3

Thanks for your impulse, Andreas. But there we can't filter documents and other non-folder-stuff out, right?

4

No, but you could create a dummy folder somewhere in Finder that has aliases just to the folder you want to display.

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5

True, a good approach. Do you have an idea how to force Finder to show the full name of a folder, e.g. in your video there are many names with "..." in between. List-view isn't the option.
BTW the Alias approach is a bit ugly, as instead of folder icons you'll see only ugly gray document symbols. Well..

6

I think you can't modify the truncation behavior ;-( also the aliases are indeed ugly I would have hoped they'd show the same as in Finder...

7

If you create a symbolic link to the folder using terminal instead of using Finder's alias function, it shows up correctly.

For example this command puts a symbolic link to the "tax" folder into the DummyFolder
ln -s ~/Documents/Tax ~/DummyFolder/

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....ahhhrg but then it's not navigatable inside the Dock anymore but instead opens Finder

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8

I heard about symbolic links a while ago. Hm, sad that it isn't working as you expected.

For documents I tried to replace the icon with the name my brain works best. But it isn't a really good workaround.

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1 Like
9

Just read about this one here which you can use to color up folder, add description text and use SF symbols.