Adding Keyboard Shortcuts for Folders

October 27, 2008 - 1:34pm

dw006@no.no asks:

Question

Hi,

it drives me crazy: it looks rather easy, but I don’t find a solution. Maybe you have one at hand. Somehow, I am convinced that I need a keyboard shortcut in finder taking me directly to my picture folder. Cmd + shift + B (yes, I’m german translating picture into Bilder) would be my first choice. Okay, I could use Quicksilver or similar, but that’s making things to easy, isn’t?

Any hint is appreciated.

Tank you.

dw006

Answer

That’s a curious one, and has been in the queue for a long while as I think of ways to make it work.

Turns out, there’s a hackish way to make it work that doesn’t take much munging at all. In the Finder’s Go menu is an item called Recent Folders. If you use your Pictures folder a lot, it should be in there. Then it’s just a matter of going into Keyboard in System Preferences and adding a shortcut for the Finder, menu item Pictures (or Bilder), and then they keyboard shortcut you want.

You’ll have to open the menu once every time Finder starts so that it can populate the menu, and it’ll only work when Pictures is an actual recent folder, but that’s how to do it without additional software.

If you’re open to additional software, you can make this a lot easier. Get Butler or similar and make the following into an AppleScript file:

tell application "Finder"

  activate

  open (path to pictures folder)

end tell

Create an action (in Butler, make a “New File” and set the action to “Run AppleScript file”) and assign a shortcut and off you go.

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October 28, 2008 - 9:13pm

Anonymous said

Couldn’t you also enable the Scripts folder, put the AppleScript in there, and then assign a keyboard shortcut using the Keyboard preference in System Preferences?

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October 28, 2008 - 10:02pm

Adam Knight said

You’d think that would work, wouldn’t you? Sadly, the keyboard shortcuts do not propagate to the Scripts menu item. Well, sadly or stupidly. Either way, there’s no way to use a keyboard shortcut to activate items in that menu so you have to find other solutions to assign keys to them.

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November 5, 2008 - 3:56am

Anonymous said

Could you also use FastScripts (Lite) to bind this AppleScript snippet to a keyboard shortcut?

http://www.red-sweater.com/fastscripts/

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January 13, 2009 - 9:39am

JiPé said

Hi,

I’m looking to open a specific folder in any instance of the Finder (and not just the Finder.app by itself) In any application where you need to open or save a file, you can type the Desktop shortcut (Apple+Shift+D) to access this specific folder in the Finder instance. This is a MacOS build-in shortcut, like Apple+Shift+H for the Home folder. I would like to assign other shortcuts to other folders (like Documents, Projects, Pictures, etc). It is possible via Actionscript?

Thanks in advance.

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