After John Gruber linked to my article macOS Tahoe broke Finder columns view, someone sent me a tip about an addition on macOS 26.2 to the Finder view options window, which you can open with the Show View Options command under the View menu.
(Correction after publication: The tipster misidentified macOS 26.2 as the version introducing this new feature. It was actually macOS 26.1.)
New on macOS 26.1 is the option Resize columns to fit filenames.
The option does not appear on macOS 15 Sequoia.
The new option appears to work… sometimes.
You can see in the second column below that resize columns to fit filenames does not always work. If the longest filename is too long, as determined by Finder, then filenames are still truncated as before.
Though a bit wonky, the new feature is a welcome addition.
Another change from Sequoia to Tahoe, brought to my attention by Gruber, is that the Finder scrollbar on Tahoe is darker than on Sequoia, the latter shown below.
I believe the difference is due to the lack of a scroller hover state on Tahoe. On Sequoia and earlier, the scroller becomes darker when you hover the mouse pointer over it.
The darkness of the scroller on Tahoe appears to be somewhere between the light and dark state on Sequoia.
I suspect that on Tahoe, Apple somehow combined the underlying source code for the system settings to show scroll bars always and show scroll bars when scrolling. Only one shade of color (or gray) is needed when the two scroll bars states are visible and invisible. Unfortunately, this sharing of code feels like a downgrade when applied to always shown scroll bars.
Both Gruber and the tipster mentioned to me that my inaccessible column resizing widget bug is “fixed” on macOS 26.3. Gruber shared a screenshot with me from the developer beta, which I won’t post here. We’ll see Apple’s “solution” for ourselves soon enough. I’m not satisfied with the change, because it appears that all Apple did was shorten the vertical scroller slots, while still covering file content with the horizontal scroll bars, in the typical Liquid Crass way.
By the way, I noticed a Finder bug on Tahoe when switching from dark to light mode.
Notice that in light mode, the back and forward buttons are still in dark mode, and the folder name is invisible (still white text, I suspect).
This is my bug report. I won’t bother to file a Feedback.
One more thing, from Gruber:
I joked last week that it would make more sense if we found out that the team behind redesigning the UI for MacOS 26 Tahoe was hired by Meta not a month ago, but an entire year ago, and secretly sabotaged their work to make the Mac look clownish and amateur.
I habitually delete old social media posts, but I still have evidence from my RSS reader:
Resize columns to fit filenames does not automatically grow a column when you add a new file with a longer name. Neither does it automatically shrink a column when you remove a file with the longest name.
Below is after taking a screenshot. The screenshot filename is truncated, so the fitting occurs only during initial navigation to the folder in Finder.
Returning to the inaccessible resizing widget issue, on further investigation it turns out that the issue does not occur on macOS 26.2 if you hide the path bar and hide the status bar in Finder.
Here’s to the crazy ones. The Finder engineers.
According to Michael Tsai, referring to this very blog post:
He also discusses the new Resize columns to fit filenames option, which unfortunately only considers the filenames that are currently in view, not all the ones in the folder.
On further testing, this appears to be correct… and it sucks.