Show the path bar in Finder on Mac

By default a Finder window shows only the folder you are inside, not where that folder sits. To bring back the location strip along the bottom, open a Finder window and choose View → Show Path Bar, or press Option+Cmd+P. A thin bar appears listing every folder from the drive down to your current one — and each segment is clickable.

Turn on the path bar

1. Click the desktop or any Finder window so Finder is the active app.
2. Open the View menu in the menu bar.
3. Choose Show Path Bar. To hide it again the same item reads Hide Path Bar.

The keyboard shortcut is Option+Cmd+P (⌥⌘P), and it toggles the bar on and off. This behaves identically on macOS 13 Ventura, 14 Sonoma, and 15 Sequoia. The setting is global — once on, the path bar shows in every Finder window, including new ones and tabs.

What the path bar shows you

Read the bar left to right and you get the full trail: the disk or iCloud Drive, then each enclosing folder, then the folder you are viewing at the far right. It answers "where am I?" without opening Get Info or the title bar's folder menu. A few things it lets you do:

• Double-click any segment to jump straight to that folder — a fast way up the hierarchy.
• Drag a file onto a segment to move it into that folder without opening a second window.
• Right-click a segment for a menu to open that folder in a new tab or window.

It is a quieter, always-on alternative to holding Cmd and clicking the window title, which pops the same hierarchy as a temporary dropdown.

Turn it on from the Terminal

If you set up Macs in bulk or prefer scripting, the same toggle is a single defaults key. It writes the preference and restarts Finder so the change shows immediately:

# show the path bar
defaults write com.apple.finder ShowPathbar -bool true
killall Finder

To hide it again, write the opposite value (or delete the key to return to the macOS default):

# hide the path bar again
defaults write com.apple.finder ShowPathbar -bool false
killall Finder

Pair it with the status bar

The path bar tells you where you are; the status bar tells you what is there. Choose View → Show Status Bar (Cmd+/) to add a strip showing the item count and free space. See how to show the Finder status bar to round out the bottom of every window.