Use Folder Browser to Turn Your Mac’s Menu Into an App Launcher
There are many great utilities available in your Mac’s menu bar. From managing your calendar to adding a virtual note , the menu bar has a great tool for almost everything. I recently discovered another useful app called Folder Peek , which allows you to place any folder from your Mac in the menu bar. You can use it in many different ways, but my favorite is to use it as an application launcher.
Using Folder Peek as an application launcher
Once you’ve installed Folder Peek on your Mac (just click “Get” when browsing for it in the App Store), choose which folder you want to add to the menu bar. Here’s a fun trick: If you select the Applications folder by clicking on it, it will display all the applications installed on your Mac, which you can click again to launch. This is ideal if you want to declutter your Dock, and it can also be faster than launching an app through Spotlight ( or a better alternative ).
However, to get the most out of this setting, a little tweaking is required. To customize the appearance of a folder in the menu bar, click the View Folder icon and press Command-Shift- (the last key is a comma). The settings window will open. Select an icon for your folder, give it a name and go to the Menu section. I like the sort order by access date and the large size of the file icon. I also limit the maximum number of icons to 15. You can experiment with these options until you find something that works best for you.
Other features worth trying
Since you can add any folder to the menu bar, there’s a lot more you can do with this app. If you add a folder that has multiple photos, you can quickly view them using Folder Peek. I’ve noticed that this process is faster than using the spacebar to preview photos and pressing the arrow keys to scroll, at least on my M1 MacBook Air. Likewise, you can also view text files, PDF files, and view the contents of various subfolders. With subfolders open in Folder View, press Shift to see additional options such as Get Info or Copy Path.
You can also always click the folder title located at the top of the drop-down menu to open the folder in Finder. Interestingly, you can use Folder Peek as a way to quickly open bookmarked web pages. To do this, open any web page in Safari and drag the URL into a folder on your Mac. Now place this folder in your menu bar using Folder Peek and you will notice that all the pages you have saved into it will be listed when you click on it. Clicking on these pages will open them in your default web browser.
There are a few more tricks in the app that you can explore by opening folders in it and pressing the Option key.