Start by browsing to the parent folder whose viewing options you wish to set and propagate to all of its sub-folders.
Don't worry if you already set the parent folder's view options earlier. It's always a good idea to double-check a folder's settings before you propagate them to all of its sub-folders.
Use the steps outlined on page 3: 'Permanently Set Folder View Options.'
Once the parent folder's Finder view is set, launch Automator, located in the /Applications folder.
When Automator opens, select the Workflow template from the list, and click the Choose button.
Automator's interface is broken into four primary panes. The Library pane holds all of the actions and variables that Automator knows how to use. The Workflow pane is where you build a workflow by connecting actions. The Description pane provides a short description of the selected action or variable. The log pane displays the results of a workflow when it is run.
To create our workflow, select the Actions button in the Library pane.
Select the Files & Folders item in the Library of available actions.
In the second column, grab the Get Specific Finder Items action and drag it to the workflow pane.
Click the Add button in the Get Specific Finder Items action you just placed in the workflow pane.
Browse to the folder whose view settings you wish to propagate to all of its sub-folders, then click the Add button.
Return to the Library pane and drag the Set Folder Views action to the Workflow pane. Drop the action just below the Get Specific Finder Items action already in the Workflow pane.
Use the options displayed in the Set Folder Views action to tweak how you want the specified folder to display. It should already show the current folder's configuration for views, but you can fine-tune some parameters here.
Place a check mark in the Apply Changes to Sub-folders box.
Once you have everything configured the way you want it, click the Run button in the top right corner.
The Finder View options will be copied to all sub-folders.
Close Automator.
When it comes to newly created folders, I find that they inherit the properties of the parent when they were created, and I cant find anyway to set that otherwise, but you could even have it based on folder events with automator to run your folder view scripts in whatever fashion you like.
Best Answer
I can submit to you this partial answer, which achieves some of what you want, but not all. No matter what combinations I attempted, Arrange By refuses to take on any initial default value other than None. I tried for a couple of hours to solve this one, but gave up. However, I thought you might still benefit from what I did manage to achieve.
The following steps set all folders to list view, and sort by Kind. Although you wanted to have them sorted by Name and arranged by Kind, in the absence of being able to set a default value for Arranged By, what I found was that sorting them by Kind will do just that, whilst using the filename for secondary sorting. That is, the files will be listed by file type, such as JPEGs, TIFFs, MP4s, etc., but within each group of, say, JPEGs, the files will be sorted by name.
1. Backup com.apple.finder.plist
2. Set top-level defaults using the
defaultscommandDefault to list view:
Default Arrange By flags that don't seem to be effective:
3. Use
PListBuddyto set nested defaultsI initially had the first four set to
namein an attempt to achieve the original objective. Upon failure, I set them to all tokindto achieve the result I described.Ignore any
Entry Already Existsreports when running these commands.4. Clear the .DS_Store files
5. Restart cfprefsd and Finder
That's the best I can achieve for now. Hopefully, someone else can build on my answer and give us the missing piece.