Show the Status Bar in Finder Windows

In this video, we’re going to take a look at how you show the status bar in a Finder window. With a status bar, we’re able to see how many items are in a folder as well as how much space is on your Mac. This is one of the first things that I set up whenever I’m on a new Mac. Let’s see how we show the status bar and why we want to show the status bar on the Mac. Let’s go to my Mac.

Let’s open up a new Finder window. I go down to my Finder and the Dock, click on it, and we have a new Finder window. Let’s go over to my Downloads folder. I have a number of different files and folders in this folder.

Now, what I would like to do is I would like to see how many files and folders I actually have in my Downloads folder here. If I select a few of these, I’d like to see how many I have selected. Let’s go ahead and select a few of these. What I would like to do is I would like to easily see how many of these I have selected, or maybe what I want to do is I want to see just how much space I have on my Mac. Well, we can do all of this when we show the status bar in a Finder window. The status bar is going to show at the very bottom of your Finder window.

Now, I’m looking at this in macOS Big Sur, but we can do this even with older versions of macOS. This is not a Big Sur feature. This is a macOS feature. So it’s going to be available on macOS Big Sir, all the way down to even Sierra or even Lion. So this is not a Big Sur feature. It’s a macOS feature.

So, how do we show the status bar? Well, all we need to do is just go up under View in the menu bar, and then you’re going to see an option for Showing the Status Bar. All I do from here is just select this, and now we have my status bar.

You’re going to see; I have six items of 13 selected. So I know I have 13 items in this folder. Six of them are selected, and I have 396 gigabytes available on my hard drive. Now I can easily see how many items are in a folder, how many items I have selected, and how much space I have available on my Mac.

This will show at the bottom of every Finder window. Let’s go and open up another Finder window. I go up under File in the menu bar, and then we go over to New Finder Window.

Let’s take a look at my Applications. I want to see how many applications I have. I select this; it shows all my applications. I go down to the bottom, and we can see I have 129 items, which means I have 129 applications, or, I should say, applications and folders. There are a couple of folders in here as well. If we go to my Documents here, I can see that I have 11 items. And if I select a few of these, let’s go ahead and select some of these, I have four items selected, and when we go down to my status bar, I can see I have four of them selected.

So that’s how we can show the status bar and why we may want to show the status bar on the Mac. When we show the status bar, we can see how many files and folders are within a specific folder. We can see how many of them are selected, and then we can also easily see how much space we have on our Mac. To show the status bar, all you have to do is just open up a new Finder window, and then you go up to View in the menu bar and select Show Status Bar. Once you show that status bar, it’s going to show in every Finder window.

So that’s how you can show the status bar on the Mac.