Finder And Filesystem

Mad's here today. Um, I'm going to show you how to use Finder and how to access the file system.

First of all, you may have seen before on your dock this icon that says Finder. You can just click it to open a new Finder window. The Finder is a program that displays the file system. The file system contains all the files on Macintosh HD, and you can click this, and here are all the files on /, and here's users. Then your home directories and users. These are all the users' home directories. You double-click on Alex, which is my username, and you see all of your files.

Then here's Desktop with all your desktop documents and stuff. Right there is my desktop. And, um, actually, Macintosh HD and entitled, or just Macintosh HD on your computer, those are just drives; that's not actually on your desktop. Um, so everything's in your home directory. Applications is /Applications. Documents is your home directory /Documents.

And another secret thing is files that begin with DOT are hidden files. So in your home directory, there's actually a file called, or a folder called .Trash. What .Trash is, and Trash has a capital T, is whatever is in the trash. And, um, you don't see it here because it begins with the dot, but you can go into a terminal and do an ls -a to see it.

Um, and let me demonstrate. Say I try to rename something on my desktop, say, Programs, um, to be .Programs. Let me just rename this file here, um, this Programs thing, and let's call it .Programs. An error will come up, and it says you can use a name that begins with the dot because the names are reserved for the system. Please choose another name. Well, that's not actually true; files that begin with the dot are just not displayed.

Um, so yeah, and that's cool, and um, so that's how to use Finder. Thanks for watching Maads 101. Go to youtube.com/mad11 for more videos like this on how to do stuff on a Mac. Thank you for your time, and goodbye.