Sidebar Ordering and Keyboard Selection
A couple of quick sidebar tips for you.
Depending on your operating system and personal preferences, you may be more accustomed to having all of the folders grouped at the top of a folder’s listed contents while all files are listed below. Or perhaps you prefer to have your files and folders intermixed in alphabetical order. Whichever way you prefer to view files/folders in the sidebar, TKE has you covered.
To switch the sidebar file/folder ordering, head on over to preferences (Edit / Preferences / Edit User – Global menu option), select the Sidebar panel and make sure that the Behaviors tab is selected. Simply toggle the checkbutton labeled Show Folders at Top to cause the sidebar to display folders first or folders intermixed.
If the sidebar has keyboard focus, you can quickly select a file or folder within the current folder by typing the name of the file. As long as you enter the successive characters within a second of each other (the default time), the characters will be appended to the current search string; otherwise, waiting beyond a second will cause the search string to clear out and entering another key will select the first file/folder matching the new search string.
If one second between characters is not enough or too much time, you can adjust the value within the same Sidebar / Behavior tab within preferences, by increasing/decreasing the Append characters to search string if entered within: value.
And since we are on the topic of using the keyboard within the sidebar, you can always select the parent folder by hitting the left arrow key and you can open the currently selected folder by hitting the right arrow key. This means that you can quickly change the selection of any file/folder within the sidebar using only the keyboard.
Your mouse or trackpad might get a bit lonelier with these tips.