Set What Folder A New Finder Windows Shows

Now when you first set up your Mac, when you open up a new Finder window, it opens up to your Recent Files. Well, what you can do is set it to open up to a specific folder. This is how I have mine set. I have it set to open up to a specific folder. Maybe you want to have it open up to your Documents folder, or maybe you want to have it open up to your Home folder. You no longer want to just have it open up to your Recent Files. So, how do we do that? We can do this through the Finder Preferences. It’s pretty simple.

Now I’m going to show you how this works with macOS Mojave. This is an older version of macOS, but the same technique can be used with newer versions of macOS and even older versions. You can use the same technique that I’m going to show you with macOS Catalina, Big Sur, or even Monterrey. You can also use it with Mac OSX High Sierra. Let’s see how we can set what a new Finder window opens to on a Mac. Let’s go to my Mac.

Let’s go and open up a new Finder window. I’m going to click on the Finder here, and if we look it opens up to my Recent Files. If I go and create another new Finder window, I’m going to use command-N. Again, it opened up to my Recent files.

What I like to do is I like to have my windows open up to my Home folder, so then what I can do is I can select the folder that I want to get into. To do that, we go up to our Finder and then we go over to our Preferences. This is pretty easy to set. From here, we need to make sure that we’re looking at General, and then you’re going to see New Finder Window Show. From here, I just select what I want my Finder window to show, I just select the folder I want. I want it to be my Home folder. If I want it to be a different folder, maybe I have a work in process folder, and I like it to open up to that. What I would do is I would go to my selection here and then go to Other, and then what I can do is I can go and select another folder. Now what I’m going to do is I’m just going to leave it at macOS Mojave.. I click on Choose, we can see it as set for Mac OS Mojave. I’m going to close this and let’s go and close these windows.

Now, what do you think’s going to happen when I open up a new Finder window. Command-N, we’re looking at macOS Mojave. So now what I can do is I can go to my Documents folder, double click on it, and I’m looking at my documents. Let’s go in Command-N again, open up a new Finder window. That opens up to macOS Mojave. I want to open up this one to my Downloads folder, double click on it. And now I’m looking at my Downloads folder. Command-N I’m back at macOS Mojave. This is how I prefer to have it. If you need to look at your recent files again, where you can do is you can easily just click on Recents, and now you’re looking at your recents, so you can still see your recent files, but all you have to do is just go to the sidebar and click on Recents.

So that’s how we set what a new Finder window opens up to on the Mac. All we have to do is just go to our Finder preferences, and then you’re going to see under General, New Finder Window Shows. From there, you just select which folder you want your Finder windows to open up to when you create a new window. Again, this works on all versions of macOS iOS. Even though this video was created with macOS Mojave, it also works with High Sierra all the way up to Monterey, and I can only guess that it’ll also work in future versions of macOS.

So that’s how you can set what a new Finder window opens up to on the Mac.