nisus.com

This is not a Nisus question. Like the thread about blue badges, this is a Mac question that crops up in many apps, Nisus included.

Create a new file. Type something in it and click the red button in the upper left to exit the document.

A dialog box pops up so you can save the file. The third field is titled "Where". A default location is suggested with a double up/down arrow.

Click that up/down arrow to reveal the components of the path to the suggested folder, Locations (disks and network places), Favorites, and Recent places.

On my system, a number of those Favorites are old folders that no longer exist and are grayed out. It seems like a simple question. How do I clear those old Favorites, which are apparently Finder Favorites?

The most common answer I get in Apple forums is, "What are these strange things you call Favorites? These are a wonder the modern age hasn't yet seen."

Second most common response is a condemnation of buggy applications, despite the fact the grayed out folders are listed by every app using that close file dialog.

Then there are suggestions for how to clear Finders favorites, which is the one app I can find that doesn't display the old zombie directories. They do not appear in my Finder as favorites, and every procedure I've used to clear Finder Favorites has not touched the favorites listed in the close dialog.

The problem has persisted across several OS updates. It's been this way for years.

Anyone have any ideas? It's not affecting my work, it's just annoying.

Side note to technical writers: Never, ever document how to do something without documenting how to un-do it.

Finder Favorites are the locations in your Finder window side bar.
You should just be able to drag them out of the side bar. When they show an (x) you can let them go and they disappear.

But reading your explanation, you seem to suggest that the Finder window has a list of Favorites that differ from those in other places where the list of Favorites appears. Is that right?
Have you tried adding new Favorites and/or deleting ones that you do have? Do any of those appear in /disappear from the list of Favorites?
Depending on that experiment, I might try to re-create the "ghost favorite" (assuming you know the path) and see if you can remove the location that way.

G'day, Amontillado, Philip et al

I was intrigued by this problem, but I couldn't find a satisfactory resolution of it, so I didn't post a reply earlier. But maybe it's still worth my while saying something about it.

The list of Favorites that appears in a Save dialog box should be the same as the list of Favorites that appears in a Finder window Sidebar.

If you Control-click on a Sidebar item, you are presented with several options. I suggest trying each in turn to see if light is shed on the problem.

I looked through all the likely Settings and Preferences files (including in the various Libraries), and conducted searches that included invisible and System files, but I could find nothing relevant. I found this strange, as it suggests that the Favorites list is encoded in the operating system in such a way as to be inaccessible to the user — something that hardly seems necessary.

I'm not sure why some items are grayed out. I can only think that perhaps they represent orphaned aliases or maybe folders on some other volume not presently accessible to the computer you're working with.

I'd suggest running Onyx with all guns blazing and see what happens.

Cheers,
Adrian

Thanks, all.

Yes, the Finder favorites are a subset of the favorites I see in the file open/save dialog used by many Mac applications.

If I recreate one of the zombies, it appears in the file dialog along with the zombie. My theory is folders must have some form of UUID.

I'll keep hacking at it. When/if I find a cure I'll update this thread.