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Opening Files and Folders With the Enter Key in OSX Finder

Tuesday, July 24th, 2007

Just got my first Apple computer, a Macbook Pro a few days ago. One of the few things that has been annoying me are the keyboard shortcuts in Finder for navigating around. In Firefox I press Apple-Left and Apple-Right to go back in forward, so to make Finder act more like my browser I went to System Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Keyboard Shortcuts and added two new ones for Finder.app, mapping “Back” and “Forward” to the shortcuts I wanted. Almost there, but pressing Enter on a file or folder and having it want to rename the item instead of open it really annoyed me. I won’t get in to a rant on the contextual meaning of the Enter key in a file navigation program, the fact is that I often open files and folders and rename them only a fraction of the time so I want to press a single key to open things. My friend who is an engineer at Apple gave me these instructions:

  • Create a shortcut for “Open” just like “Back” and “Forward”, and map to something not in use like Ctrl+X
  • Run “open ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist” in Terminal
  • Find the NSUserKeyEquivalents branch, and then find the entry for Open
  • Open TextEdit and press Enter to create a newline, and copy the newline by dragging from the first line to the second line and copying
  • Back in the shortcut for Open, erase the Ctrl+X binding and paste in the newline character
  • Close and save. To make the changes take effect I had to kill Finder at the Terminal, you could also reboot OSX to make the new bindings take effect

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