[update - as per the comments - in recent 10.6 releases the best way to remove things from the sidebar is to click drag the folder away then push the cmd key before letting go of the mouse]
[update 2 - fixed typo]
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…
~/Library/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.
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“Or, hold Down the Command KEy while dragging, it works!”
it works very well THQ THQ THQ …
yup command key option is much easier!