When you have extended information displayed under icons with the Finder from the ‘show item info’ Finder preference, you’ll occasionally run into an annoying truncation with used and available disk space.
While one easy solution to this is to expand the spacing to show the full file names of Mac desktop items (the recommended method), there’s another approach for Mac users who are adventurous and advanced enough to edit system files comfortably.
If you’re bothered enough by this to want to change it, here’s a solution that involves tweaking a system file:
* Back up your Mac first, you will be editing system files and if you break something you could really cause yourself an issue. Do not proceed if you don’t back up your Mac first.
* Navigate to /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/Resources/
* Find and locate English.lpoj and open it
* Within this directory, locate the file ‘Localizable.strings’ and back it up in a safe place
* Now launch the ‘Localizable.strings’ file in a text editor
* Search for the following string: “IV9” = “, ^0 free”; (it may be easiest to search for IV9)
* Remove the ‘free’ text following ^0 but keep everything else identical, the new string would look like this:
"IV9" = ", ^0";
* Save the file and exit the text editor
* Kill the Finder and relaunch it, you can do this via the command line by typing killall Finder
and it will automatically relaunch on it’s own
* Problem solved! The full size informaiton should now be visible.
This works because it makes the overall text displayed shorter by removing the five ‘ free’ characters (space + free), allowing for the full display of the more useful information (space used and space available). The display problems seems to be less of an issue in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, but it’s always annoyed me in earlier versions of MacOS X.
This is part of a broader tip on MacTricksAndTips about changing virtually any default text within Mac OS X, I think it’s the most useful though by far, but if you feel like changing other default text check out their article on the matter.
This is really not recommended, but if you want to try it yourself, be sure to backup your Mac first with Time Machine. And don’t miss more Mac tips and tricks.
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