Show Finder's status bar: item count and free space at a glance

Finder's status bar is a thin strip at the very bottom of each window. When it's on, you can see exactly how many items are in the current folder and how much space is left on the drive — without opening Get Info or About This Mac. It's off by default, and it takes two seconds to turn on.

Turn it on from the View menu

Open any Finder window, then:

1. Click the View menu in the menu bar.
2. Choose Show Status Bar.

A narrow bar appears at the bottom of the window. It shows something like "47 items, 312.5 GB available" — the item count on the left, the free disk space on the right. The setting sticks across all windows and restarts.

The keyboard shortcut

Once you've turned it on at least once, you can toggle it instantly with:

⌘ Command + / (forward slash)

The same shortcut hides it again. This is one of those shortcuts that's easy to hit by accident and then forget — if your status bar has mysteriously disappeared, this is usually why.

Turn it on via Terminal

To enable the status bar without touching the View menu — useful if you're setting up a new Mac or scripting preferences — open Terminal (Applications › Utilities) and run:

# show the status bar
defaults write com.apple.finder ShowStatusBar -bool true
killall Finder

Finder will relaunch with the status bar visible. To hide it again:

defaults write com.apple.finder ShowStatusBar -bool false
killall Finder

What the status bar shows in different views

The information in the status bar adapts to what you're looking at:

• Inside a folder: number of items in that folder + available disk space.
• With files selected: number of selected items + their combined size.
• In a search result: number of results found.
• In Recents or All My Files: total item count from that smart folder.

The disk space figure always refers to the volume the current folder lives on — so if you're browsing an external drive, you'll see that drive's free space, not your Mac's.

Status bar vs. path bar — what's the difference?

These two bars are often confused because they're both turned on from the View menu:

• The status bar (bottom of the window) shows counts: how many items, how much space.
• The path bar (just above the status bar when both are on) shows location: the full folder path, clickable to jump to any parent.

Both are worth enabling. They don't overlap and together give you a much clearer picture of where you are and what's there. See how to enable the path bar if you want both.

Why it's worth keeping on

Most people turn off the status bar by accident (⌘/ is easy to hit) and don't notice for weeks. Once you start watching item counts, you catch things you'd otherwise miss: a "Downloads" folder with 3,400 items, a project directory that should have 12 files but shows 9, a drive that's 97% full. The status bar is glanceable information that costs nothing to show.