Panther’s Finder: Window and dialog box position

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
January 4th, 2004 • 11:34 pm

It’s a small, yet significant detail, which is especially noticeable on large screens such as mine.

If you go to the Finder, select a file, and hit cmd-I to get the File Information window on that file, the File Information window opens in the top-left corner of your screen, regardless of where the window containing the selected file is.

Then if you go to the “Open With” section, choose a different application, and click on the “Change All…” button, the Finder displays a dialog box asking for confirmation right in the middle of your screen. In my case, the middle of the screen is several hundred pixels away from the top-left corner where the File Information window is located.

If I am using the mouse for all of this, that’s a lot of going back and forth between the left side of the screen and the center of the screen.

Yes, I can use the keyboard to dismiss the confirmation dialog instead of the mouse, but that doesn’t solve the problem, since I still have to move my hands from the mouse to the keyboard and back.

As I said, it’s a small detail, but it seems to me that Mac OS X could be a bit more clever about dialog box positioning in relation to the window that the dialog box applies to.


2 Responses to “Panther’s Finder: Window and dialog box position”

  1. vaag says:

    No problem for those who have extended keyboard navigation selected. They can do it all from the keyboard.

  2. Pierre Igot says:

    True — but I’d rather not go there again :). I still cannot bring myself to turning full keyboard access on, because it causes a significant increase in the number of times I have to use the tab key to go back and forth between controls.

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