Finder Window Resize in Mountain Lion

Question

Finder, Two Monitors, on one I keep a number of folders open in List View.  This suits my workflow.
In Lion we lost the the upper right hand button that switched on and off the Sidebar...OK, that changed, I can live with that.
Clearly it switches of and on by selecting the Window and View>Sidebar (off/on) or option>command S. OK..so far!
You could always resize a window by grabbing the lower right hand corner. Lion and back!! 
(Letter A...see later) Now with Mountain Lion, in List View you can only size the window height and the width only adjusts just so far (too wide, I only want to see the filenames).
Switch Sidebar on and then off again and now the right hand corner works as it always has going back eons. and I can resize the window narrower as I want it.
Again...OK as far as it goes.  Now either Reboot, Restart or just log out and in and when Finder opens you see the window you sized as you left if for just a moment and then....ZONK, WOOSH....almost as if by magic and before your eyes...it pops back to some crazy default width that is too wide so now you I am back to Letter A (see above).  As you can see you are caught in a circle never being able to get back to how this Finder Software has worked for perhaps the past 20 or so years.
I accept that I may be doing something wrong...but I can't for the life of me find it in this group and have tried every preference I can find...nothing helps.  I sincerely think this is a bug...but I'm open to being enlightened (provided I can continue to use my long standing workflow).
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Hi John,
Since we started with OS X each release has cool new features and new little annoyances or things that don't work. Plus these days everyone is an "expert", so we get no real help from Apple and tons of bad info - maybe especially on this, the Apple "support" site.
Sorry I assumed you recognized Applescript. Here's how to do it:
First, make sure the Finder window you want to work with is open and set up close to what you want (ie. sidebar hidden, view as list, sort by name, etc.)
Then open the AppleScript Editor app (which should be in the Utilities folder) and choose "New" from the File menu.
Paste in:
     tell application "Finder
          get bounds of window "Applications"
     end tell
Then click the "Run" button at the top of the window. It will return something like:{1604, 44, 1864, 1165}, which are the rectangular coordinates of the window "Applications". The numbers represent left side, top, right side, and bottom.
That first script is just to get the start point for finding the rectangle you want to end up with.
Open another New script window from the File menu and paste in:
                tell application "Finder"
                              set bounds of window "Applications" to {1604, 44, 1864, 1165} -- or whatever rectangle you want
               end tell
When you click "Run" it will set the Applications window to the rect specified. Just play with the numbers to get the exact size and location you want.
I haven't tried rebooting yet, but you can save the script to run anytime, even add it to your startup items to make it run at boot time if necessary.
Cheers...