Manually Removing Items From the OSX Finder Sidebar
The OSX Finder Sidebar is pretty cool. It lets you have a list of favorite folders that you can easily navigate to. From time to time one wants to update the list to reflect the current things being worked on. In a recent cleanup of my sidebar, I had more pain that I wanted to face, but was able to sort out where the preferences are maintained, and wanted to make it easy to work out in the future.
It's actually pretty straightforward…
~/Libary/Preferences is where user preferences are kept. So open up a terminal and type cd ~/Libary/Preferences to get to the preferences directory
Then type find . -name *sidebar* in directory, to search for sidebar preferences. You should see the plist: com.apple.sidebarlists.plist.
Finally type open com.apple.sidebarlists.plist to open up the property list editor, which makes it is easy to then navigate through the tree and remove items. Finder only loads the properties when it is first started, so you will need to reboot to see the changes take effect.
June 23rd, 2007 at 5:21 am
How come dragging the icons back out of the side bar didn’t work? Normally you just drag them out of the sidebar and they turn into a puff of smoke and disappear. Much easier than editing the plist.
Also, got those recent changes tests working and deleted a whole bunch more untested code.
June 23rd, 2007 at 10:07 am
Dragging out from the sidebar works great when you can actually select the icon :). When the file for the icon isn’t there, you cannot select it, so dragging away doesn’t work so well.
October 9th, 2007 at 2:54 am
GOD BLESS YOU!!! I had a whole bunch of quicktime icons in my sidebar that I couldn’t get rid of because the files they corresponded to no longer existed on my harddrive (they were driving me crazy!). This worked like a charm. Although, I was able to just do a “find . -name” from the initial Terminal prompt to open the preference file.
Thanks again!
November 28th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
Good post!
Now for my question.
Would it be possible to edit this plist via a login script so that when a network user logs in, their network folders appear in their sidebar?
Thanks!
November 28th, 2007 at 9:58 pm
Hey Anthony.
That’s a good question, to which I honestly have no idea about how to answer. I guess it depends on how early apple loads up finder, because the update to the plist would have to be done first. See: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPSystemStartup/Articles/CustomLogin.html for more info on how to run things at login, and give it a go. I’d love to hear how you go.
April 9th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
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May 30th, 2008 at 10:54 am
Thanks Rob - worked perfectly for removing items which had ‘lost’ their target and which I couldn’t remove the normal way. Thanks again.
July 20th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
I followed directions, but when I typed open com.apple.sidebarlists.plist, textedit popped up with a bunch of gibberish and letters that didn’t make sense.
July 21st, 2008 at 11:16 pm
@Jen: You probably need to get plist editor, which is distributed with Xcode. You should be able to find Xcode tools on the CDs that came with your Mac, but you can also download it from developer.apple.com
August 22nd, 2008 at 8:29 am
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November 22nd, 2008 at 1:50 pm
Thanks, man !!
December 15th, 2008 at 6:54 am
Sorry, but this might have been fixed by now. I had the same problem, but simply click on an Icon in the Sidebar, do _NOT_ release the mouse and dragging it out of the sidebar works fine for me. Even if the File/Directory doesn’t exist any longer.
I’m running 10.5.5.
January 15th, 2009 at 9:28 pm
hi just lost all my items in the sidebar. didnt do anything! i lost them! how can i get them back! thank you in advance
February 24th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
Reboot is not required. Once you have made your changes to com.apple.sidebarlists.plist and saved it you can just Force Quit (Relaunch) Finder.
Force Quitting is under the Apple Menu.
Otherwise a helpful post - thanks!
February 24th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
@gerasimos: just delete your com.apple.sidebarlists.plist file and then relaunch Finder through a Force Quit or reboot your Mac. OS X will just recreate a new default com.apple.sidebarlists.plist with the factory original Sidebar items.
May 14th, 2009 at 5:01 am
exactly what I was looking for - thank you!