MAC OPEN LIBRARY FOLDER IN FINDER HOW TO

I’ve come up with 18 ways to do so which one(s) you choose will depend on how frequently you’ll need to access the folder and which method better fits your workflow.

MAC OPEN LIBRARY FOLDER IN FINDER HOW TO

You just need to know how to access the folder or, if you prefer, unhide it. Luckily, as I mentioned, the folder is just hidden, using a special file attribute called the hidden flag.

While I understand Apple’s motives here-I’ve had to troubleshoot more than a few Macs on which an inexperienced user had munged the contents of ~/Library-there are plenty of valid reasons a user might need to access their personal Library folder. But that’s fodder for a different article.) Yes, I realize that’s a questionable assumption, given that the first user account on a Mac is always set up as an admin account. (Why hide ~/Library but not /Library, the similar folder located at the root level of your drive, which holds systemwide support files? Most likely because only admin users can modify /Library, and Apple assumes that a user with admin-level privileges will know what he or she is doing. This is the same reason Apple has always hidden the folders containing OS X’s Unix underpinnings: /bin, /sbin, /usr, and the like.

The reason for this move is presumably that people unfamiliar with the inner workings of Mac OS X often open ~/Library and start rooting around, moving and deleting files, only to find later that programs don’t work right, application settings are gone, or-worse-data is missing. But in Lion, Apple has made the folder invisible. What’s that? It’s gone? It seems so, doesn’t it? But rest assured, your personal Library folder is right where it’s always been, at the root level of your Home folder.

Mac open library folder in finder