We had a thread about this on the old TidBITS forum, but I’m afraid that got lost in the move. Anyway, short summary: whenever my Finder reboots or relaunches (or I switch from clamshell to internal or vice-versa), my first Finder window always came up all small and useless at the bottom of the screen. All the usual advice with closing all Finder windows and then opening a single Finder window and setting that right, deleting plists, deleting scores of .DS_Store files, sacrificing a goat during a full moon etc. didn’t help. Every single time, I had to close the first Finder window, set up a new one the way I wanted to have it (column view, specific location, size, etc.) and then that survived, but only until the next Finder relaunch.
Well, problem solved (kind of). I thought I’d report back in case anybody else ever ran into a similar issue or in case anybody here ever felt like there should be a one-click way to get Finder windows to show in a specific manner.
What ultimately solved my issue was reading this page which I actually believe was a piece of advice a friendly fellow TidBITS forum poster shared with me back on the old forum.
Turns out you can use Script Editor to both record all kinds of Finder window parameter as well as then create a script that sets those parameters. Save the latter as an application and you’re done. Whenever you launch that app you get your Finder window set up exactly the way it should be. If no other Finder windows are open when you do this, that should stick as your default Finder window (at least until the next relaunch).
The script I used to grab my window parameters after having set up a Finder window exactly the way I want it (with no other Finder window open) is super simple
tell application "Finder"
get properties of windows
end tellThe output of that simple script then contains all the handles and properties you’ll need to write the script that properly sets up the Finder window. For me, that script ended up being as simple as
tell application "Finder"
close every window
open startup disk
set the position of the front Finder window to {0, 23}
set the bounds of the front Finder window to {0, 23, 1234, 908}
set the zoomed of the front Finder window to false
set toolbar visible of the front Finder window to true
set the sidebar width of the front Finder window to 231
end tellThe only thing I haven’t quite figured out yet is how to set the width of the columns in my Finder window. Fortunately, with option-drag that’s quick and easy to by hand. What for some reason didn’t work is
set the column width of the front Finder window to 206Oh well.