Dexter Rucker is a long-time Mac owner, and knows his way around OS X. But he writes that he cannot seem to get a basic bit of behavior to stick in Yosemite:
Most of the time the Finder window opens up very small and I have to resize it to make it larger, but sometimes it opens how I last closed it. With past OS X operating systems, it opened how it was left which is rather large. Is there a way to have the window open how it was last closed?
This has baffled me as well, because I’ve seen inconsistent behavior, and I did some exploring. In my experience, I can’t resize a window and then get the next opened window to work the same way. I checked through forums for the wisdom of crowds, and many people suggested deleting a variety of preference or Finder-configuration files. While that’s not a terrible thing to do, it also seems extreme.
In Yosemite, I tested one suggestion after I was unable to set a window’s default opening behavior. I created a model window, closed it, and then closed all windows (Command-Option-W, Option plus close button, or hold down Option while selecting File and choose Close All Windows). Then I held down Option and right-clicked the Finder icon in the Dock and selected Relaunch.
Voila! After that point, whenever I resized a Finder window, all subsequent windows would open in the same dimensions, offset slightly in location, including the width of the sidebar. I tried this in the current public El Capitan beta, but had zero luck. Perhaps it will be fixed by release.
What’s odd about this solution is that I had just restarted the Mac a few hours before. Relaunching the Finder may clear files that persist across OS X’s restart.
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Author: Glenn Fleishman, Senior Contributor
Glenn Fleishman’s most recent books include Take Control of iOS and iPadOS Privacy and Security, Take Control of Calendar and Reminders, and Take Control of Securing Your Mac. In his spare time, he writes about printing and type history. He’s a senior contributor to Macworld, where he writes Mac 911.