You can move up the hierarchy by clicking on a folder along the path bar. The top level is followed by arrows pointing to subfolders that show the path of the currently selected item. This maybe your Mac hard drive, a network drive, iDisk or an external storage device. The left most end of the path bar is the top level, which will always show the drive (also known as the volume) where the window’s contents are located.

The Show Path Bar option is grayed out if a Finder window is not open. Next, go to the View menu and choose Show Path Bar. This is done by double-clicking on your Macintosh hard drive icon from the desktop. To enable the path bar, first open a Finder window. The path bar is a slim strip near the bottom of your Finder window. With the path bar enabled, you will always know where the file or folder selected is located. If you have several folders of the same name in different locations on your Mac, it is quite confusing when you do not know the path of the folder you are in. Something the column view can't do.When browsing through your files and folders in Finder, it is easy to get lost and not know where you are or what directory you are browsing. In addition to that, you can expand as many folders in the navigation pane as you want. Visual representation of where I am in the folder hierarchyĭirect access to all parent folder and their siblingsĮdit: Navigate directories without double clicking (in Navigation Pane, single click on the triangle to expand subfolders) Together, these two options give me the same functionality that the column view in Finder offered: It makes the Navigation Pane follow along to the folder opened in the main pane.

Make sure, you have the 'Navigation Pane' enabled: Windows Explorer > View > Navigation Pane I also like to have the option 'Expand to open folder' enabled. The column view is, after all, just a different way of displaying the same information that a traditional tree view also shows. The other option is to just accept Windows Explorer. Apparently, One Commander has a mode similar to the column view known from Finder. There are alternative file browsers available. Don't know of any plugins/extensions for Windows Explorer that do this.

File explorer mac os x