Disabling the Trash Can

Sometimes the Trash really stands in your way - for instance, if you have a small capacity USB drive, a memory card or a Windows partition. You want stuff deleted from the Finder to be immediately erased instead of moved into the Trash Can.

To do this you need the Terminal (if you’re a beginner, see our terminal tutorials first). You’ll first need to change directories to the USB drive location - all drives addresses are to be found in the /Volumes directory. Once in the right location, you just need to remove and recreate the Trash folder - see below how:


cd /Volumes/YOURUSBDRIVE
rm -rf .Trashes
touch .Trashes


Easy, right? From now on, whenever you delete something on the drive, OS X will alert you that it will be deleted immediately.

How to view hidden files and folders in Finder?

Still in Terminal, type “defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles ON” (no quotes). Press Enter.
Next, restart the Finder process - type “killall Finder“.

From now on, in Finder you’ll see all hidden files and folders. Warning, it won’t be very pretty.

To reverse, repeat the same steps but with the first command “defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles OFF”.

(via applepedia)

Right-clicking with only the trackpad

All new switchers learn pretty soon that in order to right-click on OS X, they need: a. a two-button mouse or b. to press Ctrl while clicking.

Well, Apple laptop owners have a third less-documented choice(I didn’t know about it until recently): tapping the trackpad with two fingers.

If it doesn’t already work for you, then you must enable it: in System Preferences, open the Keyboard & Mouse item and make sure to check the “Tap trackpad using two fingers for secondary click” check box.
(via Ron Miller)