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In Finder's list view, you can click the little triangles to the left of folder icons in order to reveal the contents of the folder. In 10.7 Lion, this reveal/expansion is accompanied by a vertical sliding animation.

My problem is (a) the animation slows me down and (b) the animation will often hiccup even on my new i7 Mac Mini with external video card (especially on folders containing many files).

I've searched high and low on the googlesphere for a solution to this, but I've only come across these terminal commands, to no effect:

1

defaults write com.apple.finder AnimateInfoPanes -bool false

No effect on Finder, info panes don't seem to have reveal animation anyway

2

defaults write com.apple.finder DisableAllAnimations -bool true

No discernible effect on Finder

3

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool NO

This does disable the zoomimg new window animation in all apps, but doesn't affect my issue

Is this an issue for anyone else? Does anyone have a solution?

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I have looked as well! -- but have not found a way to do this. TinkerTool currently does not expose a way to help. Nor have I found a way to speed up the animation. Sorry. – David James Oct 21 '12 at 16:45
I'm not sure that 'true' and 'false' will work. Try 'YES' and 'NO' instead. You need to restart Finder after each change. – Mark Thalman Dec 11 '12 at 16:25
I retested and it doesn't make a difference, both "YES" and "true" evaluate to a '1' internally (NO/false evaluates to 0) – beibei Dec 12 '12 at 21:40
Did you run those terminal commands as sudo? – NessyString Mar 20 at 4:23
Yes, ran commands with sudo and verified settings changed with 'defaults read' – beibei Mar 22 at 2:08

2 Answers

up vote 0 down vote

Tinker Tool might be able to help:

enter image description here

Under Animation effects, it has the following three options:

  • Show animation effect when opening files
  • Animate opening info panels and Desktop icons
  • Animate selecting info panel categories

Perhaps one of these would solve the problem. If you're interested to know what os x setting it modifies, I asked that question here.

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I could be wrong, but panels & categories are quite different from lists. I doubt this would give the desired result. – sudo rm -rf Mar 23 '12 at 4:52
1  
I tried TinkerTool, but it has no effect on the issue I'm describing. I tried disabling all the animation options under Finder and I also tried Accelerate animation when rolling out sheets under General – beibei Mar 25 '12 at 20:57
up vote -4 down vote

Have you tried "Simple Finder" hidden setting? Run the following in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.finder InterfaceLevel simple

If that doesn't work you may try searching though Secrets, it's a database of these hidden settings.

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