CosmilThe sidebar is the most customizable part of Finder — which makes the ceiling you eventually hit all the more noticeable. Here’s everything it lets you do, and the one thing it doesn’t.
Pin, remove, and reorder Favorites#
- Add a folder: drag it into the Favorites section — a horizontal line shows where it’ll land. Or select it and press ⌃⌘T (File → Add to Sidebar).
- Reorder: drag items within the section. Favorites is the only section that lets you choose the order; the rest sort themselves.
- Remove: right-click → Remove from Sidebar, or drag the item out of the sidebar until the little ✕ appears and let go. The folder itself is untouched — sidebar entries are just shortcuts.
- Apps too: drag an application in while holding ⌘ if you want a launcher in your file windows.
Control the built-in sections#
Open Finder Settings with ⌘, and switch to the Sidebar tab. Every standard item is a checkbox: Recents, AirDrop, Applications, Desktop, Documents, Downloads, your home folder, iCloud Drive, external disks, connected servers, and so on. Unchecking hides the item; it doesn’t disable the feature.
Two related tricks live outside that panel:
- Hover over a section header (Favorites, iCloud, Locations) and a chevron appears — sections collapse and expand.
- Your home folder isn’t shown by default on new Macs; it’s one of those checkboxes, and pinning it is the single best sidebar upgrade for most people.
Tags: the closest thing to categories#
The Tags section mirrors the color labels you assign to files. In Finder Settings → Tags you can choose which tags appear in the sidebar, rename them, and recolor them; clicking a sidebar tag shows every file carrying it, wherever it lives on disk.
Tags are genuinely useful — but note what they are: saved searches by label, not places. You can’t drop a file “into” a tag’s sidebar entry to file it somewhere, and a tag list is no substitute for grouping the folders themselves.
The wall: one flat list#
Now the limit. Favorites is a single, flat, unnamed list — and that’s the entire organizational model:
- No custom sections. You can’t create a “Client Work” or “School” group with its own header.
- No dividers, no nesting. Ten pinned folders or thirty, it’s one undifferentiated column.
- No renaming. The section is called Favorites, forever, and sidebar entries always use the folder’s real name.
Pin everything you use and the sidebar becomes the junk drawer it was supposed to replace. This isn’t a hidden-setting situation — the capability doesn’t exist, and third-party sidebar hacks died with modern macOS security.