Here's how to make Safari's tab navigation not suck!

With the release of Mac OS X Lion, I switched back to Safari as my main browser. Almost all the extensions I want are available for it, and it’s much less buggy than Google Chrome was beginning to be. But there are a few things that bother me about Safari, one of which is the way you navigate between open tabs.

With every other browser, you can navigate between open tabs by hitting Command + the tab number (#2 would open the second tab from the left, #3 the third, etc.). But with Safari, hitting Command + a number opens the link number of whatever is in your bookmark bar. Handy if you actually have bookmarks in your bookmark bar, but I have nothing but folders. Hitting Command + Shift + } four times to reach the fifth tab from the left is a pain because it requires both hands.

Thankfully, Olivier Poitrey offers SafariTabSwitching, a SIMBL plugin that brings the Command + number feature to Safari. I’ve been using it so long that I actually forgot where I got it from. It’s quite a nice add-on, and I’ve never had a problem using it. The only foreseeable issue is that it is a SIMBL plugin, which Apple doesn’t condone, and could cease to function at any OS update in the future if Apple so chooses – such as OS X Mountain Lion, due later this summer.

Thankfully, a creative and persistent developer has finally figured out a way to add them into Mac OS X’s Finder without completely replacing the look, feel and functionality of the Finder in the process.

Tabs in Mac OS X's Finder windows

TotalFinder, a SIMBL application by BinaryAge adds elegant tabs, borrowed from Google Chrome, to Mac OS X’s Finder windows. The tabs look, feel and act like tabs in your Web browser for the most part. Along with the tabbed windows (seen above in the screenshot), TotalFinder also adds a few other really cool features.

Though you can drag and drop items between tabs, you can also hit Command + U or double-click a tab while holding the Option key down to merge two adjacent tabs into a sort of dual-pane window. As you can see in the screenshot below, the dual-pane window shows both tabs in the same window, including the sidebar on each side.

Dual-pane tabbed Finder windows

Another really handy feature is the ability to invoke, via a keyboard shortcut, a window that glides up from the bottom of your screen, called the Visor. The Finder window fills the entire width of your monitor and about one-third the height. You can quickly hide the window with the same shortcut (double tapping the option key, by default). BinaryAge borrowed this idea from Visor, their app which pops open a Terminal window with a keyboard shortcut.

I found the Visor window feature to be somewhat annoying for me, but other users may love it.

TotalFinder doesn’t stop there with the features. You can also set TotalFinder to place folders at the top in list view, stop creation of .DS_Store files, and show invisible files in the Finder. All of TotalFinder’s preferences can be accessed in the Finder Preferences window by hitting Command + , while in the Finder.

TotalFinder is still in Alpha stage, but I’ve found it perfectly usable – experiencing no adverse behavior at all. The developer plans on charging for the app eventually, but until it’s 1.0 release, TotalFinder is free of charge. Considering how long it took Apple to add virtual desktops (called Spaces in OS X), this may be the only way to add tabs to Finder windows for a very long time.