How to disable Finder triangle reveal animation in 10.7 Lion

animationfinderfolders

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?

Best Answer

I've been looking for this solution for quite some time. What this is is an NSOutlineView. The expanding and collapsing of an NSOutlineView now always animates the roll down and roll up of the content and makes you wait for it to finish before you can actually see and use the content. It's infuriatingly irritating that we can not turn this unwanted "feature" off so that it functions as before.

According to a developer at Apple, there is no way to do this and I was encouraged to file a request since this is an annoying addition to the OS that you can not turn of that was not present in previous system releases.

I've reported the bug/usability regression to Apple. It's bug# 14442959.