
When you’re in the List or Cover Flow views, each column has a name at the top of the list. Your choices are things like Name (sorted by the name of the files or folders alphabetically) and Date Modified (sorted by the date each file or folder was last modified). To sort the items in the folder by a particular attribute, click the Sort By pop-up menu near the top and then select the sort order. This displays a view options window for the folder as seen in the screenshot below: (View Options for a Finder folder.) In any of the four folder views, select View > Show View Options from the menu bar or type Command-J. Sorting items in a folder can be one of the most useful methods of organizing those items. You can choose to sort the items, arrange them, or resize the columns in certain views. Once you’ve selected a folder view, customizing how your items are displayed is quite simple. Clicking on any one of those buttons switches the view accordingly.

In a macOS Finder window, they’re identified by the four buttons indicated in the diagram above. The four different macOS folder views are easy to switch between. “What Are The Four Folder Views and How Do I Switch Between Them?” (The four macOS folder views.) What we’ll look at today is how you can customize those views into other ways to get the perfect view of your files and folders.
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With macOS High Sierra, those views have settled into four major types - viewing folders and files as icons, as a list, in columns, or in Cover Flow view. In the early 2000s with the release of Mac OS X, folders gained a number of different views that made it possible for Mac users to see files and folders in a variety of ways. Early in the evolution of the Macintosh, folders became a way to logically organize documents.
