When you’re using Safari and you’ve only got one tab open the Tab bar disappears. For those who want the Tab bar to be visible all the time, whether you’ve got one or one-hundred tab open here’s the terminal command you’ll need to tell Safari to always show you a Tab bar. Just enter the following text into the Terminal, press Enter and relaunch Safari.

defaults write com.apple.Safari AlwaysShowTabBar -bool YES

Should you not like how this makes Safari act, you can always revert back to the previous setting by chaning the YES to a NO like what follows.

defaults write com.apple.Safari AlwaysShowTabBar -bool NO 

What do theses commands do? Well, these sets the attribute AlwaysShowTabBar of Safari’s preferences file (com.apple.Safari.plist) to a boolean value of yes or no (or basically true or false). Using the terminal is much easier than opening the file itself.

By default Finder does not list the sizes of all items on your hard drive when viewing folders and files. If you’re curious about the size of an item and Finder simply places an -- in the Size column give this a try.

Bring up the View Options for the current folder you’re looking at, do this by either using Cmd+J, View > Show View Options or by right-clicking in a blank part of the Finder window and choosing Show View Options from the menu. Once there you’ll see a window like the one below, check the Calculate all sizes checkbox and close the window.

For an additional bonus, click the Use as Defaults button to apply this change to all subfolders. For one reason or another Finder does not remember this setting after logging out and back in, I would assume thats to minimize the work the CPU and hard drives need to do while browsing your files to make the OS snappier. If you only care about the size of a single file or folder, Quick Look will give this info to you with less effort, additionally the Get Info option under the File menu (also available by right-clicking the file/folder) will tell you a little more.

Some backgrounds look best with Mac OS X’s menu bar transparent, while others look terrible. I suppose this is why Apple allows you to toggle the transparency of the menu bar in the Desktop & Screensaver preference pane in System Preferences (as seen in the image above).

The ability to disable the transparency of the original translucent menu bar came in the 10.5.2 update released by Apple, since then users have had the ability to toggle the setting. What this comes down to is individual preference, I encourage you to try your menu bar both with and without transparency enabled to find what suits you best. Although this may be a well known feature for long-time mac users (or just Leopard early adopters), tips like this help newcomers to the mac feel at home, look for more tips like this one in our Mac Basics category.