Mario. Front End Web Developer, Snowboarding Addict

OS X: Safely Rename System Folders

I finally upgraded my 3 year old Macbook Pro this week, and decided against migrating files from the old one to start fresh, only moving things as I found I needed them.

Seeing as I generally have all my video related files in the Movies folder, I thought it would be better to rename this to Video, but it turns out you can’t just change the name of System Folders by hitting return in Finder.

Some quick googling led me to a tip on macosxhints.com on how to Safely rename various system folders.

OS X has System Folder Localizations files for a bunch of different languages, you can simply edit yours to change the name of your desired System Folder.

cd /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemFolderLocalizations/en.lproj/
open SystemFolderLocalizations.strings

Log out and back in again to see the changes.

Note that this does not actually change folder name, just how it’s displayed in the UI, so applications that reference those folders will not be affected. If you list your home folder contents in terminal you will see that we still have a Movies folder.

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