Sidebar separator hack for OS X

Becky Stern forwarded us Jonathan Berger’s simple and useful hack that adds dividers to the Finder sidebar.

I use the Finder’s Sidebar pretty heavily, but it was getting to be a mess that could really use some dividers. Solution? Make an empty folder called ” ……………….” and stick it in there.

You’ll need a leading space with periods. Dashes also work and patterns like ” – – – – – -” are satisfying too. Periods work particularly well, because you can make the filename long and when it’s abbreviated in a skinny sidebar it’ll still look correct with “…” added at the end.

To add more than one separator, you need a unique folder for each one. To do this, you can either make folders with different numbers of periods, or, for a consistent length, just place all the folder copies inside each other like Russian dolls.

The final trick is to give the separator folders a blank icon to disguise the fact that they are just folders sitting in your sidebar. I was too lazy to do this part and I’m still happy with the effect, though it doesn’t look quite as hot as Jonathan’s screen grab above.

Hacking Separators Into the Leopard Finder Sidebar – Link