How to quickly navigate to a folder in macOS Big Sur and Monterey

A secret weapon in the Finder arsenal is the Go > Go to Folder feature. Choose that menu item (or type Command-Shift-G) and you can leap around the macOS filesystem without having to navigate folders. This is frequently useful when you’re working with low-level settings files or items hidden away in the user or system Library folder.

Apple made a significant change between macOS 11 Big Sur and 12 Monterey in how it helps you find folders: Monterey offers a squishier set of matching options, making it more likely you’ll find a folder that you don’t know the precise name of, or if you type fewer characters to make a match.

Big Sur limits matches to exact autocompletions.

Monterey provides matches, not just autocompletion, in declining order of exactness to what you typed.

In Big Sur, start to type a path and macOS will offer only auto-fill suggestions. In Monterey, however, it offers exact matches, but also fuzzier ones. Type in ~/.ss, and macOS suggests Users > gif >.ssh, the path to the.ssh folder in my user folder. But it also matches .dvdcss, which has two s’s in a row, and then suggests even looser potentials, like .zsh_history and .keybase-installer. As you go down the list, matches become even more tangentially related to what you typed.

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