Mac Tip when Opening a File

I discovered something on my own today about the my Mac. Over the years, I've determined that it takes about 6 months to leave the newby stage, 1 year to leave the novice stage, and 3 years of using a particular operating system or deep-featured application (vim or LaTeX, for example) before you can become an expert. Obviously, this varies a bit, but one of my more favorite epigrams is "Patience is waiting months and years, not mere days or weeks or hours."

Anyway, I'm patiently learning more and more of the Mac esoterica and stumbled onto a nifty thing today. I was setting up SCPlugin, which is a Subversion plugin to the Finder (i.e., the Mac alternative to TortoiseSVN for Windows). Anyway, part of the process requires telling the SCPlugin preference pane where to find your Subversion.

This is a problem because I have it installed in a fairly typical location: "/usr/local/bin/svn". However, the Finder (and the rest of the GUI) is completely (or now I know, not quite completely) ignorant of the "/usr" directory. You see, you wouldn't want to confuse the typical Mac luser, I guess, with all the gritty details of Unix. However, there's a trick.

I was trying to figure out a way to get there when I tried to type "/" in the search bar of the "Open" window. Bingo! We have a winner. It pops up a window titled "Go to the folder", you type in any path you like and it shows up. Neat. This is also a handy short cut because browsing the file system is for slow sissies. I'll be moving faster from now on.

Anyway, this is probably common knowledge, but I'm just stepping away from the novice stage, so I'm still picking up bits and pieces.