The Tips - Mac Kung Fu - page 171

Quickly Viewing the Library Folder
To quickly browse your LIBRARY folder, open a Finder window and click the Go
menu. Then press and hold OPTION . You'll see a new entry temporarily appear
for the LIBRARY folder, which will disappear when you release OPTION .
Permanently Restoring Access
To return to viewing the LIBRARY folder permanently, open a Terminal window,
and type the following:
CHFLAGS NOHIDDEN ~/LIBRARY/
Then open Finder, hit SHIFT + COMMAND + G , and type ~ (tilde) in the dialog box
that appears before hitting Go. This will display the contents of your home
folder, with the LIBRARY now taking its place among the contents. Note that
you'll likely have to repeat the CHFLAGS command each time you install a major
system update for OS X (that is, updating from 10.7.2 to 10.7.3, for example).
If you decide in the future that the LIBRARY folder should be hidden again, open
a Terminal window, but this time type the following:
CHFLAGS HIDDEN ~/LIBRARY/
Tip 148
Add Cool Visual Effects to Stacks
Stacks are the spring-loaded lists of files that appear whenever a folder on
the Dock is clicked. With a fresh install of OS X, DOWNLOADS is set up as a stack
on the right of the Dock, near the trash icon. However, you can add your own
folders by dragging and dropping them there (release the mouse button only
when the other folders have slid out of the way), but remember—you're not
copying the folder to the Dock. You're only creating a shortcut there.
Activating Highlighting
To make stacks slightly easier to use, you can configure your Mac to highlight
icons when your mouse cursor passes over them (the same highlight that
appears if you open a stack and navigate to an entry in the list using the
cursor keys—for an example, see Figure 26, Activating a hidden Dock stack
highlighting effect , on page 173 ). Highlighting in this way is also quite a neat
visual effect.