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Aliases on the Mac are far more useful than their counterparts in Windows.
 technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

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Organize your OS X Mac with aliases


May 19, 2004


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, The Post-Standard

   I'm a neatnik on my Mac. There's clutter all around me -- I even have trouble finding my socks in the morning -- but my OS X desktop is an object of pride. It's organized better than the U.N.
   My secret can be yours, too. It's all a matter of aliases.
   No, I don't mean the kind detectives like to track down. I mean shortcuts. Apple calls them aliases. (There's no standard name for these tiny files that represent, or point to, normal files and folders. They're links, aliases or shortcuts, depending on who butters your bread.)
   Aliases on the Mac are much more interesting and far more useful than their counterparts in Windows. Oddly, even though modern versions of Windows have been around since 1995, the all-important idea of a shortcut never got past first grade in Windows. On the Mac, shortcuts are grad students; in Windows, they're just toddlers who can't find their way around.
   Example: On your Mac, if you move the file an alias points to, the alias is automatically updated. It always points to the right location. In Windows, moving the original always messes up the alias (what Windows calls the shortcut). All Windows can do is volunteer to find the moved file when the alias stops working. (If it knows the file was moved, why can't it know where the file went? The Mac does this automatically.)
   Aliases make everything easier on your OS X Macintosh. Here's an example: If you're editing photos and want to place them into a folder inside your "Pictures" folder, create that new folder inside "Pictures" and then make an alias to it on your desktop. Then you can drag your pictures right to that alias. For all the Mac knows, you're actually dragging them into that homemade folder in the "Pictures" folder.
   Or suppose you're working on a report in Microsoft Word X. The Word file is deep inside your "Documents" folder, and you don't want to hunt it down every time you want to add something to that report. The solution? Put an alias to that Word file on your desktop.
   Making an alias is easy. Click the original item and drag it to another location while holding down the Option and Cmd keys, then let go. (The Cmd or "Command" key is sometimes called the "Apple" key.) OS X will create an alias where you drop the item. The alias will have the same name as the original item unless there is another file or folder at that location with that name already; if there is, the alias will have "alias" as part of the name.
   I use aliases to create two Neat Things on my OS X Mac.
   1. I keep a folder on my desktop called "Stuff." I drag aliases into into it every time I want to keep track of something. (And because of the kind of work I do, I want to keep track of things all the time.) Some of them are Web aliases -- bookmarks, in other words, if you know the old-time term, or "Favorites," as a lot of people call them now. Some are document aliases, pointers to articles I'm working on, that kind of thing. Some are folder aliases.
   By keeping them handy, I can open any important folder on my OS X Mac with two double clicks -- one to open the folder called "Stuff" and one to open the alias for the folder I'm interested in.
   2. I have a menu that sprouts up from the dock containing aliases for all the programs on my Mac. I have a few hundred. I made this better-than-a-Start-Menu menu by creating aliases to all my applications, then sorting them into folders, then putting those folders into one overall folder called "Apps."
   One of the organizing folders is called "Tools," another is called "Graphics," a third is called "Utilities" and so on. I put the "Apps" folder into my "Documents" folder, then dragged the "Apps" folder to the right side of the dock. That made a menu out of it. I simply click and hold to get the popup.