To do that, use the Cmd-J shortcut or choose “Show View Options” from the “View” menu. Let’s change the background color in icon view first. Then the horizontal lines is a “list view”, the four vertical boxes is a “column view” and the last is the “cover flow” view that proved rather a bit controversial when it was first introduced. The first, four tiny squares, is selected. There are four different views that have shortcuts. So let’s have a look at Mavericks and how things work, shall we?įirst off, here’s a standard Finder window with its default white background: Even if you do change the background, however, the other views are automatically black text on white, which is a bit weird, but apparently that’s not supposed to be part of the things we can tweak, as you’ve learned. However, it’s still the case that there are four different views for a Finder window and only one of them can have a changed background color or photo specified.

The good news is that when I tested things in the very latest version of Mac OS X 10.9 “Mavericks”, it does seem to be sticky, even across restarts. Changing the background color of a Finder window on the Mac is one of those rarely used features that sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t.

How to change mac background to white