Questions about Finder » File

[tjluoma]

These may be questions only @peternlewis can answer, but they may be of interest to others, so I'll ask here rather than email…

Someone on Twitter asked about trying to set a keyboard shortcut for "Tags…" in Finder, which is under the "File" menu, as shown here:

For some reason I can't seem to get System Preferences to assign a keyboard shortcut for that, so I tried Keyboard Maestro, but the "Tags…" entry does not even exist:

Not only that, but I'm confused by why there are 3 "Eject" options and 2 "Compress" options in Keyboard Maestro.

Normally I would expect that Finder would have some hidden alternates that are revealed if you hold down the ⌥ key, but these seem to be identical, and I'm wondering if they do different things, and if so, how are we supposed to differentiate between them.

[qrt]

Weird: I had a keyboard shortcut assigned to Tags … for years in the system preferences, that stopped working today (macOS 10.14.6) I also can't access it using Keyboard Maestro 9.0.1. The duplicate KM entries disappeared after a reboot. I installed the supplemental Mojave update yesterday.

• Chris

[JMichaelTX]

@tjluoma

so I tried Keyboard Maestro, but the "Tags…" entry does not even exist:

The Finder "Tags..." is found in KM menu for me running Keyboard Maestro 9.0.1 on macOS 10.14.5 (Mojave).
What versions are you running?

[tjluoma]

@JMichaelTX

What versions are you running?

Weird… I'm using Keyboard Maestro 9.0.1 on macOS 10.14.6 (18G95)

Not the sort of thing you'd think would change in a late point-release of macOS.

[eurobubba]

It has something to do with the way the color "label" favorites are displayed in the menu. For me it started when I installed Mojave. The workaround is to delete all of your "favorite" tags in Finder preferences (just the ones in the area at the bottom of the Tags pane in Finder prefs). Then setting a keyboard shortcut in the Keyboard system prefpane should work again. At least, it did for me.

[peternlewis]

This was discussed here:

Tagging Files from the Finder

Using KM it appears I can't access the "Tags" item in the Finder>File menu. Previously I had a macro working that attached two tags to a selected PDF file thus: Select “Tags…” in the Menu “File” in Finder Insert Text “tag1 tag2” by Typing With the upgrade to Mojave it appears this no long works. When I checked the first action, "Select Tags" I found that the Tags item no longer appears in the file menu as seen by KM, although of course it's there in the Finder. I have no reason to suspect …

Tags… doesn't show up in my testing, so clearly there is something even more wacky that the Finder is doing.

[tjluoma]

@peternlewis

Tags… doesn't show up in my testing, so clearly there is something even more wacky that the Finder is doing.

Yeah, it even looks a little different in the menu, at least to me.

I don't really use tags all that often, so this isn't a big problem for me, but it's an odd thing for Apple to do.

[JMichaelTX]

@tjluoma

Someone on Twitter asked about trying to set a keyboard shortcut for "Tags…" in Finder,

What is the objective? I have several scripts that deal with Tags.

Also, I observed that the Finder in my system does NOT show the color circles just above the "Tags…" menu item, as shown in your screenshot.

@tjluoma

For some reason I can't seem to get System Preferences to assign a keyboard shortcut for that,

I had no problem doing that.

I also have a "Tags" button in the Finder toolbar. Do you?