A pet hate of mine on Mac is the inability to order directories with folders at the top. It makes perfectly logical sense to put things in Alphabetical order, but when you&#39;re a developer and working with lots of folders which you have to navigate through and huge directories it&#39;s just a pain.
Unfortunately, it&#39;s not as simple as checking a box. You&#39;re going to have to rewrite a tiny bit of one of the files. First of all you&#39;re going to want to convert the text file into XML so that you can edit it, then open it with Nano.
<div class="highlight"><pre><code class="language-bash">cd /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj
sudo plutil -convert xml1 InfoPlist.strings
sudo nano InfoPlist.strings</code></pre></div>Once you have the file open, navigate to the section which has Folder in, about a 3rd of the way down which will look like this
<div class="highlight"><pre><code class="language-xml">&lt;key&gt;Folder&lt;/key&gt;
&lt;string&gt;Folder&lt;/string&gt;</code></pre></div>Simply put a space before Folder in the String field so it looks like this.
<div class="highlight"><pre><code class="language-xml">&lt;key&gt;Folder&lt;/key&gt;
&lt;string&gt; Folder&lt;/string&gt;</code></pre></div>Once you&#39;ve done that, you need to convert the file back to binary format so your system won&#39;t break once it&#39;s restarted.
<div class="highlight"><pre><code class="language-bash">sudo plutil -convert binary1 InfoPlist.strings</code></pre></div>All done, simply restart finder and then order your folder by &quot;kind&quot; type.
<div class="highlight"><pre><code class="language-bash">sudo killall Finder</code></pre></div>

A pet hate of mine on Mac is the inability to order directories with folders at the top. It makes perfectly logical sense to put things in Alphabetical order, but when you're a developer and working with lots of folders which you have to navigate through and huge directories it's just a pain.


Unfortunately, it's not as simple as checking a box. You're going to have to rewrite a tiny bit of one of the files. First of all you're going to want to convert the text file into XML so that you can edit it, then open it with Nano.

``` bash
cd /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj
sudo plutil -convert xml1 InfoPlist.strings
sudo nano InfoPlist.strings
```

Once you have the file open, navigate to the section which has Folder in, about a 3rd of the way down which will look like this

``` xml
<key>Folder</key>
<string>Folder</string>
```

Simply put a space before Folder in the String field so it looks like this.

``` xml
<key>Folder</key>
<string> Folder</string>
```

Once you've done that, you need to convert the file back to binary format so your system won't break once it's restarted.

``` bash
sudo plutil -convert binary1 InfoPlist.strings
```

All done, simply restart finder and then order your folder by "kind" type.

``` bash
sudo killall Finder
```

Order By Folders First in Mac OSX Lion