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You'll be able to do it more more easily than your Windows neighbors do it.
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Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983
T h e R o a d L e s s T r a v e l e d
How to add the 'Move To' function to an OS X Mac
Nov. 26, 2003
By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2003, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2003, The Post-Standard
Ever since I first used Windows 95 and its successors, I've admired one feature in Windows that Macs didn't have. It's the "Move To" function that shows up when you click the right mouse button on a file or folder. It's easily configurable, too, giving savvy Windows users a quick way to move items from one location to another without needing to sort through layers of folder windows.
But Macs can have that now. All you need is a $10 utility program called FruitMenu, from www.unsanity.com/haxies/fruitmenu. It runs on all versions of OS X, including the latest version, OS X 10.3, code-named Panther.
The idea behind "Move To" is simple. Every computer user has places where only one kind of file is stored -- folders for photos, for example. You might have a documents folder, a pictures folder and a movies folder. And you might have, as I do, subfolders inside those main folders for certain kinds of images or special kinds of documents.
Moving stuff into those folders can be a hassle. You either need aliases for those folders where they're handy -- on the desktop, maybe -- or you need to open the destination folder and drag the item from wherever it is into that folder. This is a pain, as you probably already know.
That's where a context menu is very helpful. It's the sort of menu that's normally hidden away and only shows up when you need it. In Windows, the "Move To" folder is part of the context menu that pops up when you right click on an item.
And now you can do the same thing on an OS X Macintosh. Except that you'll be able to do it more more easily than your Windows neighbors do it.
FruitMenu, the program that makes this possible, is available from www.unsanity.com. It is free to try and $10 if you want to keep using it.
If you already use FruitMenu, you no doubt know that the main purpose of this little gem is to put the Apple menu back in OS X. The standard Apple menu in OS X is a skeleton menu that can't be used to launch new programs; you're supposed to do that from the dock. (It does let you relaunch recent programs, but that's not a substitute for the real thing.)
FruitMenu lets you create a real menu, as simple or as complicated as you like, right where the OS X Apple menu goes. It does this very nicely, and once you install it and create a menu you'll surely consider the $10 cost of FruitMenu to be money well spent.
But the "Move To" feature is less obvious. It doesn't show up in the Apple menu. You have to configure it from the FruitMenu preference pane. Open System Preferences, then FruitMenu, then Contextual Menus. With the Contextual Menus window open, select "Move To" and click the "Add" button. Then choose the destination folder, which can include your desktop, which is actually a folder.
You can do that as many times as you like, and you can create submenus within the "Move To" menu to keep seldom-used destination folders out of the way. A folder I like to include in my "Move To" list is the Screen Savers folder in the Library folder that is itself in my home folder. (A user's "home folder" is the folder that holds the desktop and all other files belonging to that user. Its actual name is the name the user typed when setting up OS X. Mine's named "Al," for example.)
Using "Move To" could not be easier. If you have a one-button mouse, Ctrl-Click on the item and choose the destination from the FruitMenu "Move To" list. If you have a multi-button mouse, click the right button to get the list.
FruitMenu has many other functions. We'll look at some of them another time.
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