This Mac tip is provided by Mark Greentree and was originally posted on Mark’s blog – Everyday Mac Support. For more of Mark’s tips visit his site, follow him on Twitter, or browse his archive of posts here.
How To: Remove Items From The Finder Window Sidebar In Mac OS X Lion
Should you wish to remove items from the Finder sidebar then you have two ways to do this. This first of course is to navigate to Finder-Preferences in the menu bar at the top of your display and then select the Sidebar tab which will then allow you to deselect areas which are not of interest.
You can also press Command-, (Comma) on your keyboard as shown below to access the same set of preferences:
However, if you would prefer to remove them by using a simply drag and drop plus keystroke combination you can also do that.
You may already know that you can move areas in the Finder sidebar up and down within their own collective areas. However, if you click and drag the area in question out of the Finder window it will return to the original location and will not be removed. This is in place to prevent accidental removal.
Now, if you hold down the Command key on your keyboard then click and drag one of the areas away from the side bar you will notice that a puff of smoke will appear next to the icon which will indicate that you can remove it from this area. Letting go of the mouse click at this point in time will remove the area in question from the sidebar.
Now, the good news is this can be undone if you wish. Simply navigate to the Finder Preferences, as shown at the beginning of this article, and re-highlight the area in question that you have removed. As you can see from the image below the area which I removed was music:
All you would have to do now is click on the box next to ‘Music’ and that area will once again be presented in your Finder window sidebar.
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