MacOS Finder – What Does the Arrow on the Bottom Left of the Folder Icon Mean?

Simply put, the aptly named button "More…" loads more results.

By default^† the "All My Files" smart folder is arranged by kind and sorted by last access time. Arranging means those blocks that contains files belonging to its category type (e.g. Movies or Music) and sorting means the order the files are sorted within the block.

All My Files is all about you, so ask yourself: what would be your most typical use–case scenario involving this smart folder?

I use last access time for both arranging and sorting the folder. I have categories of "Today", "Yesterday", "Last 7 days", "Last 30 days" and "Earlier" and within every category the items are sorted by the last access time during its period.

Now, this is where the More… button shines: All My Files folder is a smart folder which means the contents are generated by a Spotlight search. That means the more results it tries to query the longer it takes to make the contents usable. Question is, would you rather

1. see the most relevant files quickly
2. see the whole lot of your files after staring at slowly updating, laggy, maybe blank Finder window for quite some time?

For reference, when both arranging and sorting the All My Files by last access time, the results I get after consequent presses of More… button are:

• Today: 2 → 3 → 4
• Yesterday: 14 → 15 → 16
• Last 7 days: 185 → 193 → 198
• Last 30 days: 354 → 364 → 373
• Earlier: 9445 → 19425 → 72145

After the second press the button is gone, probably indicating all the available files have been found.

Now the odds are the file I'm looking for can be found from the initial search (which already returns 10000^‡ results)—and if not, the All My Files folder may not be the best tool to search for the file in the first place.

Honestly, at times I'd wish for a Less… button, for even more responsive All My Files usage; 10000 results are more than enough.

Finally, if you happen to realize the All My Files folder doesn't quite suite your workflow, you can, of course, remove it from your sidebar.

^{†) I'm not 100% if these are the default settings, but I could assume so.
‡) You might notice that after the second press I get a total of 20000 results—there's some logic applied!}

The question mark (and disabled popup menu items) indicates that Terminal thinks the working directory is on a remote computer, and therefore you cannot navigate to it in Finder using the popup menu. If you look at the last item in the popup menu (Command-Click on the “proxy” icon) you'll see the computer/host that Terminal thinks the working directory is on. You should find that it is not the computer’s current name.

If you’re using bash (the default shell on macOS), by default it sends a control sequence to the terminal at each prompt to tell Terminal the current working directory. Since control sequences can come from local or remote computers, it sends a “file:” scheme URL including the hostname, and Terminal verifies that the name maps to the current machine. If it doesn’t, Terminal disables the path popup menu items, because they don't correspond to local directories.

You can see the code that sends the control sequence in /etc/bashrc_Apple_Terminal (or /etc/bashrc on older versions of macOS).

[Note that if you’re not using bash, or you’ve customized it so the default behavior doesn’t occur, but your shell (or some other program you’re running) is sending control sequences to set the window or tab (icon) title, Terminal will examine it to see if it contains what looks like a pathname, and then it checks whether that corresponds to a valid local pathname. If not, it doesn’t display the window proxy icon at all.]

A scenario where Terminal can fail to recognize that the “file:” URL is on the current host is if you change your network configuration while a shell is running. A common case is putting a portable computer to sleep and moving to another location, then waking it. The local host name and address will have changed, but the shell’s $HOSTNAME environment variable still has the old host name, and that’s what it sends in the control sequence. To fix this, update the environment variable with:

 HOSTNAME=$(hostname)

Another scenario is where you quit Terminal, change network configurations, then open Terminal with Resume enabled. Terminal will restore the windows and tabs, along with the last working directory URL that each was sent. If you run into this case, $HOSTNAME will be up to date—since it starts a new shell—but Terminal can still have a stale URL until you get the shell to update it again. If displaying the command prompt doesn’t clear up the problem, try changing directories with cd to get the shell to update it.