"Option+click" no go!?!?

Question

Option+click on a folder should open this folder in a new window but previous window should close. Not in Leopard any more though!! Any one else? Solution maybe?
thanks

Answer 1

Here's what I've noticed after trying different combos of the Finder options:
1) If you have the toolbar turned off (which also is the only way to completely hide the sidebar...which is another one of my complaints), then it does seem to usually open a new window that shows the new folder's contents as it did in Tiger. But, there are 3 major issues that I think prevent this from working correctly or as wanted by most people:
a) It seems unintuitive. When the Finder preference for "Always open folders in new window" is checked, the current Leopard functionality seems to ignore this under this circumstance, making it function inconsistently.
b) I personally don't use the sidebar, especially since it cannot be dragged/minimized all the way to the left as it could be in Tiger. In Tiger, I just hid the sidebar all the way, which let me keep the Toolbar visible. However in Leopard, this isn't possible. You must have both the Sidebar AND Toolbar either visible or hidden together - there is no way to separate their visibility preference.
This is much more of an issue now because of the topic of this thread - making folders "open in new window" every time is now *only available* if the toolbar is hidden.
c) Even when it opens in a new window, it almost always seems to take on the parent window's view setting. So, (when it works and does popup in a new window) even though the window should be displayed in Icon view, if the parent's window was set to List view, the new window will open separately but for some reason be automatically switched to List view.
...I hope that makes sense. If you're having this problem, I think you'll understand what I mean.
2) If you have the toolbar turned on, option-double-clicking on a folder to open it in a new window, and close the parent window fails. Instead, what it seems to do is keep the parent window's frame there, and (sometimes) override the new folder's view settings which make the new folder be viewed in whatever the original parent folder's view settings were. For example, if the parent's folder is shown in Icon view mode, all option-clicked windows are shown in that mode regardless of whether they have a different setting, such as to view in List mode. However, this is not always the case...
I can't find any single setting that accurately allows me to know what will happen when option-clicking on a folder to open it in a new window. It definitely doesn't work consistently on my machine (a clean Leopard install). The main problem that also keeps popping up is that when the toolbar/sidebar are showing, and when it doesn't open in a new window, the window will not even resize properly to its settings so that it can show all of the items. This is a pretty big problem, I think it must even be a bug? It makes opening multi-depth folders much slower and unreliable, since the view settings for each folder are kept the same (and are definitely not always as useful as the one I had originally set per-folder).
So all in all, I think this is reduced and unwanted functionality of the Finder and possibly a significant bug. I think when the user sets the "open in new window" Finder preference, it should always be observed and used.