Quick OS X Column View Rant

Most of my OS X copatriots enjoy the love that is a “3 button mouse”, which is not standard with any Mac. And a good “3 button mouse” has the Wheel… ah the glorious wheel. Which allows, among other things, for you to quickly and effortlessly scroll up and down in any scrollable window (unless the application sucks ass). Well, Mac OS X.x (second x representing a digit between 0 and 2, inclusive) has an interesting “not like windows” file system navigation tool called “Column View”. Basically your mount points be on the left and as you view one it’s contents show up in a vertical list within a section of the current window – directly to the right. If you then highlight (by clicking) a folder from that list a new list, with it’s contents, appears to it’s right and if, dependent on window and individual column width, the window needs to scroll to the right it does so (thereby your mounts going left). The long and the short of it is: if you have a deep directory structure and you start going into that depth your folder structure keeps “going left” and your root is way left in a scrollable window. But it’s a left-right scroll therefore you can not use your scroll wheel. Someone (listen up Apple) needs to allow an option + wheel to equate to a left right scroll. That would make me happy beyond reason.