Is there any way to copy the file path of a selected item in Finder without the use of the mouse?
Is there any way to copy the file path of a selected item in Finder without the use of the mouse?
After years of using MacOS I somehow only just now became aware you even could copy the filepath at all (outside of dragging in to terminal which is just stupid) so I'm very happy to discover that, but the thing is, for the most part the reason I want to do this is for easy navigation of a file browser by copying paths from one window or tab to another, especially when I have an item selected in an open file browser window and need to specify in a file browser prompt where to save something.
In those instances on Windows for example, I will press the F4 key to select the text field of the address bar in explorer and copy the parent directory path of an item. If I really need it I can get the exact path of the item itself without the mouse too . While I'm super glad I can now approach this usefulness in Finder, the mouse totally interrupts the flow and begins to make the increased efficiency from copying paths only marginally better than just clicking through folder trees since you stop what you're doing and move hands to the mouse already anyway at that point. I'd love to just immediately copy the current path I'm in into a Finder window and use the cmd+shift+G option in another window or prompt to go the same place. The second half of that operation is easy enough, but getting the path on to the clipboard isn't because of needing the mouse.
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Actually, no sooner than I finished writing this post did I find a solution that works 90% of the way there. I can bring up the go to folder prompt with cmd+shift+G already, but I realised if I want it to tell me the current folder I can just type "." and it will display the current path and you can also just cmd+c to copy that to the clipboard. I should have realised that the go to folder bar behaves just like terminal in many ways so there'd be common commands for both.
I guess this isn't a complete solution because if I wanted the filepath of a selected object in Finder it wouldn't work as it would only give you the parent directory, but that's actually what I need probably more than 90% of the time and given the rest of the time where I need a full filepath for one specific object is so rare, it's really not a problem to have to occasionally use the mouse.
TIL