These little icons offer easy shortcuts for working with files, folders, and documents

by Sharon Zardetto, Macworld.com

Have you ever noticed the miniature icon that sits next to a window’s name in its title bar? It’s more than just a decoration. In many instances, you can work with this icon—known as the proxy icon—just as you would a full-size file icon in the Finder, which can often save you the hassle of navigating back to the original item to copy or move it. And document proxy icons offer their own unique opportunities. Here are some of my favorite time-saving tricks:

1. Move an opened folder

Say you open a folder to check its contents, realize you don’t need any of it anymore, and then decide to delete the whole thing. There’s no need to access the original folder, which necessitates opening a different window or moving back in the current one (depending on your window setup). Instead, drag the proxy icon from the window’s title bar to the Trash icon in the Dock, making what would otherwise be a multi-step procedure a cinch.

You can drag a folder proxy icon into another folder (including those in other open windows, on the Desktop, and in a Finder window’s sidebar or toolbar). You can also put a folder in the sidebar by dragging its proxy icon into the Places category.

2. Make a copy or an alias of a folder

In the spirit of “anything you can do to a folder, you can do to its proxy,” you can make a copy or an alias of the proxy icon’s folder by using the correct modifier keys. To make a copy of an opened folder, drag its proxy off the title bar to a new location while holding down the Option key. To make an alias, drag the proxy icon while pressing Command and Option.

3. Take advantage of Info window proxy icons

You have four versions of a document, each in a different folder. You’ve opened Info windows (using File -> Get Info) for each one so you can compare their various attributes, and you identify two of them as totally useless. Now that you’re ready to delete them, you don’t have to go back to their original locations to do so. Just drag each extraneous document’s proxy icon from the title bar of its Info window to the Trash.

You can also use the proxy icon (for a folder or a document) in an Info window to move the original item to a new location by simply dragging it there. Command-drag it to make a copy, or Command-Option-drag it to make an alias of the original.

For the full article, please see the MacWorld site.

http://www.macworld.com/article/150425/2010/04/proxyicons.html