How to Set a Default Arrange Type in OS X Lion?

Finder works the same way (just be sure you open a real folder and try editing the view options from the Desktop as that one window has abbreviated controls.)

Open any Finder folder
⌘+J Show View Options
make your changes
select the Use as defaults button at the bottom of the floating window

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bmike

Posted 2011-09-12T20:52:33.833

Reputation: 2 773

3"Use as Default" does not apply to "Arrange By" – jordanbtucker – 2016-09-28T19:59:05.863

Strange... there's no "Use as Defaults" button for me. I'm sure I'm looking at a "real folder". Anyone else missing this button? – Chazbot – 2012-04-05T23:18:41.463

Usually this happens when you are operating on the Desktop or another "special" folder like All My Files and not an arbitrary folder. – bmike – 2012-04-05T23:46:31.910

This "Use as Defaults" option appears to save it only for THAT specific folder, and not all folders on the computer. Setting this doesn't change any other folder. I can't seem to find any way to actually set one folder's view setup, as a global default for all other folders. It's rather maddening. – JVC – 2012-06-17T22:49:06.853

@Jonathan the OS will first respect whatever setting is established in the current directories .DS_Store file, so perhaps you are looking at folders that already have ase – bmike – 2012-06-18T14:49:00.653

@Jonathan - the OS respects any custom settings stored in .DS_Store files for each directory before the "default" settings apply. You could crawl the file system and delete these if you want everything to respect the new "defaults". – bmike – 2012-06-18T14:52:35.673

How to Set a Default Arrange Type in OS X Lion?

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