Customize the Finder Window Toolbar

In this video, I’m going to show you how you can customize a Finder window toolbar on the Mac. Now I’m going to show you with macOS Big Sur, so it may look a little bit different if you use an older macOS version, but it works the same way. Let’s see how we can customize a Finder window tool bar on the Mac. Let’s go to my Mac.

So I’m looking at my Mac here and again, I’m in macOS Big Sur, but it really doesn’t matter which macOS. The process that I’m going to show you works across all the different versions of macOS, including Catalina, Mojave, even High Sierra.

So let’s open up a new Finder window and take a look at the toolbar. I go down to my Finder here, I click on it and we have our Finder window. Across the top, we have our toolbar. This has various tools. I have here my back and forth, I can see what folder I’m on, I have my view here, I also have group, share, I can edit the tags, perform an action, and search. These are different tools on my toolbar.

What I can do is customize this. I can move these around. I can remove some of these tools and add different tools. To do that, all we need to do is just control click on this toolbar. Now what we need to do is click in an area where there is not a tool. So if I hold down the control key and I click, we have a menu that pops up. The first thing I can do is set it to Icon Only, Text Only, or Icon and Text. If you have a small screen or maybe you just like text, you don’t like the icons, what you can do is set up for Text. And now we can actually see what those tools are just by reading them. I go back over to my free space here and I control-click on it. I can also set it to icon only. I’m going to put it as Icon and Text again. That’s what I like to have.

The next thing we can do when I control-click on this is we can Customize this. This is where I can actually move these different tools around or even add other tools. So let’s click on Customize Toolbar. You’re going to see a sheet pops down here, and from here I have all these different tools. Let’s say you use AirDrop quite a bit. You can add the AirDrop. You access iCloud, you can add iCloud to the toolbar. You want to throw something away, select it and then click on the delete button, when you add it to the toolbar. So we have a number of different tools here to add them. All we have to do is just drag them up to the toolbar and place some more when we want.

So I like to have the delete key there or the delete button there. So now all I need to do is just drag this and I place it where I want. I’m going to place it here. We have the green plus. I let go, and now we have my delete button.

Let’s say I do not use tags. What I want you to do is remove the tags button to give it more room. All I have to do is just drag this off and it removes it from the toolbar. If I want to add it back in there, I can go back over to this button, added tags and drag it back up on my toolbar.

We can also rearrange these. I want to move group over next to my views. I drag it to where I want it in my toolbar.

If you want to bring it back to the default set, all you have to do is just go down to the bottom here and you drag this whole tool bar here. You’re going to see, we have a little silhouette there of it. All I have to do is just drag this up on top of the tool bar, and it’s going to remove all of the changes that I’ve made and put the default setback up there. I’m going to leave it back so we can see this in action. I click on it.

We can see we have my trash here, so let’s go and throw something away. I’m going to go to my Downloads folder and let’s say I wanted to delete this file here. All I have to do is just select it, and then I go up to Delete and it’s going to move it into the trash automatically. I did not have to drag it to the trash. So let’s do that one more time. I have this CSV file that I used to Numbers. I no longer need it. I just go up to delete, click on it and remove it.

Now, once you apply changes to a window, it does apply to all of your Finder windows. So if I close this and open up a new Finder window, you’re going to see I have my changes there. I open up another new Finder window window. It has my changes there. It applies it to every Finder window.

So that’s how we customize our toolbar in a Finder window on the Mac. All we have to do is open up a new Finder window and then control click on the tool bar. We’re going to get a sheet that drops down. And then from there, what we’re able to do is drag different tools up on the toolbar. We can also drag tools off of the toolbar and we can rearrange them. Any changes we do apply, applies to all of your Finder windows. And again, even though I showed you on macOS Big Sur, this does apply on all macOS versions..

So that’s how you customize a Finder window toolbar on the Mac.