Mac 101: Finder filename sortingThe neat-freaks among us (myself included) enjoy keeping things in their particular place and order. When making a folder of files, sometimes I want items to fall outside their alphabetical order -- for instance, often I like to have a special folder that's always at the top of a list.

The easiest way to do that is to name your folders with a symbol as the first letter in the file or folder name: like a space, an underscore ( _ ), or a tilde ( ~ ). Mac OS X determines the order of these special characters using your language settings in the International pane in System Preferences.

The names of files and folders in Mac OS X can use almost any character out of thousands of Unicode characters, which include symbols, arrows, and icons as well. There are only two characters you can't use: one is the colon (because it's used by the system). You also can't usually use periods (or full stops) as the first character in a file name (because they're reserved for hidden files).

Also, as far as Mac OS X is concerned, the folder name 'AARON' is the same as the folder name 'Aaron' (or 'aaron' for that matter): this is called case insensitivity. Mac OS X filenames are considered case insensitive.

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(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)