Howard Oakley:

Now move the pointer to the right edge of the list of folder contents, just far enough to the left to avoid moving the window divider, but not so far as to fully select items from within that folder. Click there and the item will be selected, but in grey, the same as would appear if it had been fully selected but its window was no longer in focus. At this stage, the original folder will still be fully highlighted, as if nothing had been selected inside it, but you can drag that grey unfocussed selection to include other items inside the folder.

On my Mac, if I click on a file icon in the second column, the first column retains focus. The second column only gets focus if I click on a filename (or even farther to the right).

Now using the up and down arrow keys doesn’t move within the items inside that folder, but back with the fully highlighted folder. With a few of the items inside that folder in grey, so they’re selected but not in focus, press the spacebar for a QuickLook preview, and you’ll see the greyed items, not the folder that’s still fully selected to the left.

[…]

In other situations, this becomes infuriating.

In my log browser LogUI, separation of selection from focus can leave you clicking wildly without being able to select log entries.

Previously:

• Tahoe Broke Resizing Finder Column View
• Viewing Metadata in the Finder
• Mojave Finder’s Preview Column Shouldn’t Prioritize Thumbnail Size

Update (2026-10-21): Philip Savoulidis:

I too was wondering if there was something peculiar with my Mac. Focus seems so broken in Golden Gate that I was expecting macOS reviews to mention it. In this regard, I am glad to see focus problems mentioned here.

The behaviour seems inconsistent. For example, in Finder and Mail the sidebar does not gain focus on click, but it does in Contacts and NetNewsWire (a third-party app). The Passwords app seems like the worst offender: the password list itself does not gain focus on click (e.g. click the search field then click an item and focus remains in the search field).

I spent some time investigating this, and I think it comes down to a SwiftUI bug. List and Table in SwiftUI are affected. Both use NSTableView under the hood, but they never become first responder on click.

But I don’t think NSBrowser is built on SwiftUI, so there are probably multiple issues here.

One of the most bizarre and sometimes useful features added in macOS 27 Golden Gate is contextual naming in the Finder, as well as other places where a name for a file is useful, using Apple Intelligence.¹ I say bizarre because it’s easy to be surprised by what’s filled in—or that anything but Untitled Document or Untitled Folder appears.

Meanwhile, if you want to rename a big batch of files, you can opt for a little-known feature built right into the Finder, or dramatically increase your power with a third-party utility.

Apple Intelligence has some suggestions

There’s not much to using Golden Gate’s automatic file naming, which is the delight of a feature that’s discoverable, self-explanatory, and useful:

1. Select a file name or folder name in the Finder, wait a moment, and single-click it, so that the name becomes highlighted.
2. Wait a moment. Because Apple Intelligence is involved, some behind-the-scenes analysis of the item’s contents takes place.
3. A drop-down list of suggestions appears, which may or may not match what you want. If one does, click it. This replaces the file or folder name.

You will also see suggestions appear in Apple’s apps when you save a currently untitled document, as well as when you transfer files via AirDrop or text an image to a person or group. I’ve noticed when I text a screenshot on my iPhone, the name “Screen Image” appears in the message text without any detail.

As you can imagine, results vary. However, I’ve found in my testing that Apple Intelligence does a reasonably good job. This includes looking at what a photo or image file represents and suggesting a name derived from that—a kind of hidden Visual Intelligence.

If you don’t like this feature, go to Finder: Settings: General and uncheck “Suggest file names.”

It has a number of limitations:

• Names aren’t always suggested. This may be because Apple Intelligence has evaluated that the current name is better than one it could offer, or because the query times out or is determined to take too much computational time.
• There’s no feedback when it fails—no message appears that says “no suggestions available,” or the like.
• It doesn’t always use the current name as a context clue or, seemingly, pull from our private information to which Apple Intelligence has access. For instance, I clicked a file called “glenn as a freshman,” a photo taken long ago and far away, and the Finder suggestions were: “Person with Hand on Head” and “Person in Thought Pose.” Not inaccurate, but not specific. However, a folder I clicked offered suggestions derived from the folder name.
• Images with controversial elements may not receive suggestions. A picture of my older child from 15 years ago, dressed in a lobster costume that many people thought was a devil costume, gets no suggestions, while other photos of the same type, size, and time period do.
• You can’t get suggestions for a batch of files or folders, only one at a time.

Batch rename your files and folders

Apple introduced a built-in automatic renaming feature in Finder with OS X 10.10 Yosemite. It’s limited, but functional, and if you only need some basic replacing, prefixing, or suffixing of names of a group of files, it will do the trick for free.

Long before Apple built basic renaming into Finder, I began to rely on A Better Finder Rename ($30 for all current version updates) by Frank Reiff.² It lets you apply rules to rename files or folders you select, which can include extracting information from metadata in each file to apply unique information from it.³

Each renaming pattern is created in the Actions list. So if you want to renumber files and apply EXIF metadata, you can do that as two separate Actions, as shown in the screenshot.

There are many Actions categories, each of which has context-specific choices for renaming. I’ve used A Better Finder Rename in the past to fix a folder with hundreds of images that were named arbitrarily to extract the capture date, allowing for better sorting. I’ve also used it for picayune tasks, like making sure all the screenshots for an article for Six Colors had the same prefix, to make them easier to find after uploading.

What’s in a name?

In an era in which Spotlight works as advertised, coupled with the new capabilities in Siri AI, do we even need well-named files? Oh, yes, indeed. I would argue that the more sensibly named your files are, the less time you waste trying to find what you need. Visually scanning names organized at least lightly into some kind of folder hierarchy will always provide better results than searching, even today.

This battle has raged since the introduction of the Mac—nay, since the introduction of file names! Good names save time, no matter how well-indexed the contents.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

Tower 18:

But something has changed: thanks to AI coding agents like Claude Code and Codex, even the most devoted GUI fans are now spending more and more time in the terminal. You kick off a task, the agent does its thing… and then you want to actually see what happened.

That’s where Tower shines, so we felt the path from the terminal to Tower deserved a serious upgrade. With Tower 18, the Tower Command Line Tool (gittower) is no longer just a way to open a repository — it takes you to exactly the place you want to look at.

I’ve been wanting this for 15 years or so. Thanks, AI! You still can’t open a file in Tower by dragging it onto the Dock icon. Nor can you just pass it to gittower and have it figure out which repo it belongs to. But if your working directory is already within the working copy, you can now use gittower to open the file history. I’ve written a script that finds the current file in the frontmost app (BBEdit, Xcode, or Finder) and opens it in Tower.

Previously:

• Xcode’s New .xcproj Files Are JSON
• Git Tower 16
• Tower 2.0