Problems with manually renaming files in List Mode

Question

I have an iMac 24" 2.4 Ghz with 4 Gb of RAM. Sometimes when I try to rename a file in a folder in List mode, I get unexpected and strange behavior. It is intermittent. It might be that I cannot get the highlighted current name to unhighlight (in cases where I only want to change a portion of the name), or the filename box might disappear, or the folder seems to lockup, or I get blocks every other space instead of letters. Weird, strange results. I do know that I can minimize the problem, if when first entering the filename box (by hitting 'return') I move the cursor via the cursor keys to the right over the extension and then back to the left. When I do that, it seems like I have less problems.
All I can say is that it doesn't seem to be a robust as what I was used to in the Windows world. I'm new to Mac and this is the only complaint I have. I'm ecstatic about my Mac and can't believe I waited this long to convert over to it. If I could get this little glitch fixed, I'll be a 'happy camper'! (the problem's certainly not enough to make me go back to the misery I was in with Microsoft.)
Has anyone else experienced any problems such as this? Or, is there a possibility that there is something wrong with my Mac?
Or, am I doing something wrong?
Thanks for any kind help I receive.
Matt

Answer 1

Finder for Intel is the same as Finder for PPC. Its the same code, sans some endian conversions.
As for the renaming problem. Two things come to mind. In Tiger if you selected a file and pressed return, no matter what view style you were in, it would bring up the edit field and the entire name would be highlighted. In Leopard, this was changed slightly where it will now highlight everything up to the file extension. So if you have a file called 'foo.txt', it will highlight just 'foo'. This is a nice feature IMO because more often then not I don't want to change the file extension, only the 'body' of the file name.
The Edit box disappearing is a bug that has been around for a couple OS releases where if something causes the view to update (more specifically the HIDataBrowser control List View is made of) while your renaming something, it will cancel the rename session. This can be caused by a bunch of things, like the size of a file changing or mod date changing or file being added to the directory etc. It has been around for a while, but has only become more prominant due to the addition of Icon Thumbnails in Leopard. When the thumbnail is created for the file by the Finder, List View updates to show the new thumbnail which cancels the edit session. There are a couple workarounds for this:
1) Switch to Icon or Column View
2) Wait for all the thumbnails to be created before starting to edit file names. Thumbnails appear pretty quickly, and only for the files that are currently visible in the window, so you shouldn't have to wait very long, and it only happens the first time you view that folder.
3) Press Command-J while in List View and uncheck "Show Icon Previews" and then click the "Use as Defaults" button. That will turn off the icon thumbnails for all windows in List View.
I haven't seen a problem with "blocks showing up every other space" though. I assume you mean a solid black square, right? Sounds like an invalid character in the file name. Renaming the file to something else should cure that one.
Message was edited by: petrock