For the first 20 years of the Mac’s existence, you began your workday by double-clicking the Macintosh HD icon in the upper-right corner of the screen. That’s where you kept your files.
These days, though, you’d be disappointed if you did that. All you’ll find in the Macintosh HD window is a set of folders called Applications, Library, Users, and so on—folders you didn’t put there.
Most of these folders aren’t very useful to you, the Mac’s human companion. They’re there for OS X’s own use—which is why, today, the Macintosh HD icon doesn’t even appear on the screen. (At least not at first; you can choose Finder→Preferences and turn the “Hard disks” checkbox back on if you really want to.)
Think of your main hard drive window as storage for the operating system itself, which you’ll access only for occasional administrative purposes.
So where is your nest of files, folders, and so on? All of it, everything of yours on this computer, lives in the Home folder. That’s a folder bearing your name (or whatever name you typed in when you installed OS X).
OS X is rife with shortcuts for opening this all-important folder:
Choose Go→Home, or press Shift-⌘-H.
In the Sidebar (The Sidebar), click the
icon that bears your name.
You might also consider adding your Home folder to the Dock (Using Tags) or making it the window that appears when you press ⌘-N or choose File→New Finder Window (see Old Finder Mode).
All these steps open your Home folder directly.
If you’re the compulsive sort, you can also navigate to it the long way: Double-click the Users folder and then double-click the folder inside it that bears your name and looks like a house (see Figure 2-1).
Figure 2-1. This is it: the folder structure of OS X. For the most part, what you care about are the Applications folder in the main hard drive window and your own Home folder. If you have an Administrator account, you can save your documents and park your icons almost anywhere.
So why has Apple demoted your files to a folder three levels deep? The answer may send you through the five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance—but if you’re willing to go through it, much of the mystery surrounding OS X will fade away.
OS X has been designed from the ground up for computer sharing. It’s ideal for any situation where different family members, students, or workers share the same Mac.
Each person who uses the computer will turn on the machine to find his own separate desktop picture, set of files, web bookmarks, font collection, and preference settings. (You’ll find much more about accounts in Chapter 11.)
Like it or not, OS X considers you one of these people. If you’re the only one who uses this Mac, fine—simply ignore the sharing features. (You can also ignore all that business at the beginning of Chapter 1 about logging in.) But in its little software head, OS X still considers you an account holder and stands ready to accommodate any others who should come along.
In any case, now you should see the importance of the Users folder in the main hard drive window. Inside are folders—the Home folders—named for the different people who use this Mac. In general, nobody is allowed to touch what’s inside anybody else’s folder.
If you’re the sole proprietor of the machine, of course, there’s only one Home folder in the Users folder—named for you. (The Shared folder doesn’t count; it’s described on Sharing Across Accounts.)
Yes, OS X imposes a fairly rigid folder structure. But by keeping such tight control over which files go where, OS X keeps itself pure—and very, very stable. Furthermore, keeping all your stuff in a single folder makes it very easy for you to back up your work. It also makes life easier when you try to connect to your machine from elsewhere in the office (over the network) or elsewhere in the world (over the Internet), as described in Chapter 19.
If you did want to explore the entirety of OS X, to examine the contents of your hard drive (choose Go→Computer and double-click “Macintosh HD”), you’d find the following folders in the main hard drive window:
Applications. This folder contains the complete collection of OS X programs on your Mac (not counting the invisible Unix ones). Even so, you’ll rarely open programs by opening this folder; the Dock is a far more efficient launcher, as described in Chapter 4.
Library. This folder bears more than a passing resemblance to the System Folder subfolders of Macs gone by, or the Windows folder on PCs. It stores components for the operating system and your programs (sounds, fonts, preferences, help files, printer drivers, modem scripts, and so on).
System. This is Unix, baby. These are the actual files that turn on your Mac and control its operations. You’ll rarely have any business messing with this folder.
Users. As noted earlier, this folder stores the Home folders for everyone who uses this machine.
Your old junk. If you upgraded your Mac from an earlier Mac operating system, then your main hard drive window also lists whatever folders you kept there.
Within the folder that bears your name, you’ll find another set of standard Mac folders. (The Mac considers them holy: They have special logos on their folder icons, and you can’t rename them.) OS X creates these folders solely as a convenience:
Desktop. When you drag an icon out of a window and onto your OS X desktop, it may appear to show up on the desktop. But that’s just an optical illusion, a visual convenience. In truth, nothing in OS X is really on the desktop. It’s actually in this Desktop folder and mirrored on the desktop area.
The reason is simple enough: Everyone who shares your machine will, upon logging in, see her own stuff sitting on the desktop. Now you know how OS X does it: There’s a separate Desktop folder in every person’s Home folder.
Tip
The fact that the desktop is actually a folder is handy, because it gives you a sneaky way to jump to your Home folder from anywhere. Simply click the desktop background and then press ⌘-
(which is the keystroke for Go→Enclosing Folder). Because that keystroke means “Open whatever folder contains the one I’m examining,” it instantly opens your Home folder. (Your Home folder is, of course, the “parent” of your Desktop folder.)Documents. Apple suggests that you keep your actual work files in this folder. Sure enough, whenever you save a new document (when you’re working in Keynote or Word, for example), the Save As box proposes storing the new file in this folder, as described on The Mini-Finder.
Your programs may also create folders of their own here. For example, you may find a Microsoft User Data folder for your Outlook/Entourage email, a Virtual Machines folder for use with VMware Fusion, and so on.
Library. As noted earlier, the main Library folder (the one in your main hard drive window) contains folders for fonts, preferences, help files, and so on.
You have your own Library folder, too, in your Home folder. It stores the same kinds of things—but they’re your fonts, your preferences.
Note
Your own Library folder starts out invisible. But as you’ll soon learn as you peruse this book, having access to it is frequently useful. That’s why Apple gave you a sneaky way to open it even when it’s invisible: Press the Option key as you open the Go menu in the Finder; choose Library (which doesn’t appear in the menu until you press Option). Or make it stay unhidden permanently; see Use as Defaults.
Once again, this setup may seem redundant if you’re the only person who uses your Mac. But it makes perfect sense in the context of families, schools, or offices where numerous people share a single machine. Because you have your own Library folder, you can have a font collection that’s “installed” on the Mac only when you’re using it. Each person’s program preference files (the files that determine where Photoshop’s palettes appear and so on) are stored independently, too. And each person, of course, sees her own email when launching OS X’s Mail program—because mail, too, is generally stored in your personal Library folder.
Other Library folders store your Bookmarks, web browser plug-ins, cached web pages, keyboard layouts, sound files, and so on.
Movies, Music, Pictures. The various OS X programs that deal with movies, music, and pictures will propose these specialized folders as storage locations. For example, when you plug a digital camera into a Mac, the Photos program automatically begins to download the photos on it—and stores them in the Pictures folder. Similarly, iMovie is programmed to look for the Movies folder when saving its files, and iTunes stores its audio files in the Music folder.
Public. If you’re on a network, or if others use the same Mac when you’re not around, this folder can be handy: It’s the “Any of you guys can look at these files” folder. Other people on your network, as well as other people who sit down at this machine, are allowed to see whatever you’ve put in here, even if they don’t have your password. Details on sharing the Mac are in Chapter 11, and those on networking are in Chapter 12.
Sites. OS X used to have a built-in web server, software that turns your Mac into a website that people on your network—or, via the Internet, all over the world—can connect to. This OS X feature relied on a program called the Apache web server, which is so highly regarded in the Unix community that programmers lower their voices when they mention it.
The web server is gone now, as described in Chapter 19. If you have a Sites folder, it’s where you put the actual web pages you wanted to make available to the Internet at large—in a previous version of OS X.