How to Customize the Finder Sidebar on Mac

The Finder sidebar is prime real estate: one click to anywhere, from every window and every save dialog. Out of the box it's a mix of things you never open and missing things you use hourly. Five minutes of tuning fixes that — add your real working folders, cut the clutter, bring back your home folder and hard disks. Everything below works the same on Ventura, Sonoma, and Sequoia.

Add your own folders

1. Find the folder in Finder (or on the desktop).
2. Drag it onto the Favorites section of the sidebar.
3. When a horizontal insertion line appears where you want it, drop.

The sidebar entry is a pointer, not a copy — the folder stays exactly where it was, and removing it from the sidebar later never touches the real folder. You can add apps too: hold Cmd while dragging an app in (without the modifier, Finder assumes you're trying to move the app itself). A bonus you'll feel immediately: sidebar Favorites also appear in every app's Open and Save dialogs, and you can drop files onto a sidebar folder to move them there.

Remove and rearrange

• Remove: drag the item out of the sidebar until a Remove label (or a puff-of-dust cursor) appears, then let go. Or right-click it and choose Remove from Sidebar.
• Rearrange: drag items up or down within Favorites — put the two or three folders you live in at the top.
• Collapse sections: hover over a section header like iCloud or Locations and click the chevron to fold the whole group away.

Restore the standard items

Your home folder, hard disks, AirDrop and friends aren't added by dragging — they're checkboxes:

1. In Finder, press Cmd+, to open Finder → Settings.
2. Click the Sidebar tab.
3. Tick what you want: your home folder (the house icon — the single most useful box in the pane), Hard disks, External disks, Recents, AirDrop, iCloud Drive, connected servers, tags.

Anything you untick here disappears from the sidebar without deleting anything. This is also the fix when “my hard drive vanished from the sidebar” — the checkbox got cleared.

Sidebar missing entirely?

If a Finder window shows no sidebar at all, it's hidden, not broken. Choose View → Show Sidebar (Option+Cmd+S). If the sidebar looks squeezed to nothing, drag the divider between the sidebar and the file area back to the right. New windows remember the last width you set.

Make the icons bigger or smaller

The sidebar's icon and text size is a system-wide setting, not a Finder one:

1. Open System Settings → Appearance.
2. Set Sidebar icon size to Small, Medium, or Large.

This affects sidebars in Mail, Notes, and other apps too — Large is a genuine quality-of-life upgrade on high-resolution displays, Small fits more folders on a laptop screen.

A sensible starting layout

If you're rebuilding from scratch, this arrangement serves most people well:

1. Top of Favorites: your two or three active project folders — the ones you open every day this month. Rotate them out when projects end.
2. Middle: the standard set — Home, Desktop, Documents, Downloads. Home in particular replaces a surprising number of clicks.
3. Bottom: AirDrop and Applications, if you use them; otherwise untick them in Settings.
4. Locations: tick Hard disks and External disks so drives always have a visible, ejectable entry.

The test of a good sidebar: every item earns its click. If you haven't opened something from the sidebar in a month, drag it out — you can always put it back in two seconds.

Finish the job with the toolbar

The sidebar's sibling is just as customizable — you can add path controls, delete buttons, and spacers to the strip along the top of every window. See how to customize the Finder toolbar.