Just feeling my way cautiously around Mountain Lion and all seems fine except for my Finder window sidebar which is strangely missing the usual icons for the items. The item text is OK.

I may well have somehow tweaked them in Lion (made them colourful perhaps?) but with what I cannot recall. There's no app that I can see on my iMac that would do this.

Is this a feature of ML and, if it isn't, does anyone know how to get them back? I have seen many references in the past to trashing the finder preference file as a troubleshooting method but have never had reason to do so. So ! was going to do this until I noticed there was also a finder plist "lock file" pref. Which do I trash?

I have not encountered that with Mountain Lion, but on one Mac some of the preference settings were changed after the installation.

Check Finder > Preferences and see what is checked and you may have to drag some of the items from the drive to the sidebar.

Expanding on joemike's post, have you tried dragging the items you've now got in your sidebar out and replacing them?

Thank you for those suggestions Joemike and artie505. I've checked the Finder Preferences and nothing's changed. The sidebar items can't be dragged off and nothing can be dragged onto into the sidebar either. Hiding and unhiding the sidebar doesn't fix it, neither does trashing the finder plist and restarting the Finder. Also repaired permissions.

Interestingly, I saw something on MacUpdate this morning called SideEffects which promises to colourise the Sidebar icons. User comments indicate a few problems with SIMBL installation. SIMBL? I want nothing to do with something like that so shortly after installing ML!

Anyway, while missing sidebar icons are not a show stopper, it's annoying...

> ...neither does trashing the finder plist and restarting the Finder.

Restarting Finder isn't sufficient; you've got to log out/in at the least, but I suggest shutting down and starting back up just to cover all bases.

Hope this helps.

Hold the presses... I just remembered that there's a com.apple.sidebarlists.plist (in Snowy, anyhow), which may be your problem if your Finder plist is not.

Again, trash it and either log out/in, restart, or shut down and start up.

That behavior is not an artifact of Mountain Lion or at least it does not present itself on the Mountain Lion installations here. So something is definitely amiss. Try logging onto a test account and see if you can drag items on and off the sidebar. If that works in the test account then it is almost certain you have a scrambled preference file. Probably com.apple.finder.plist.

As to colorizing items in the sidebar. mine have always been black and white, so I am afraid I cannot help you there.

You probably know this already, but just for the sake of completeness...

Starting with Lion, you need to hold down the command key to drag things off the sidebar. Apple noticed that too many people were accidentally dragging things off the sidebar, and then couldn't figure out how to put them back, so they made it a little harder to do that accidentally.

I read somewhere that Mountain Lion was going to start requiring the command key to drag things off the Dock, too, for the same reason, but apparently that didn't make the final cut.

I can't think of many reasons why you wouldn't be able to drag items to the sidebar, though. The only thing I can think of is: you have to drag from the body of a Finder window. The desktop counts as a Finder window. (Thus, you cannot drag from the proxy icon in a document window, from the Dock, not even from a stack that sprouts from the Dock, from the sidebar itself, from the toolbar of a Finder window, from the Spotlight menu's found items menu, or from a Get Info window, and maybe a few other places.)

You also cannot add to the sidebar anything the OS can't make an alias to; that would probably include files residing on some "non-Mac" filesystems.

> Starting with Lion, you need to hold down the command key to drag things off the sidebar.

That behavior was actually introduced in Snowy.

Edit: But it was an important point to make, nonetheless.

Again thanks all. I've now tried trashing finder and sidebar plists, restarting each time and taking note of the Command requirement for dragging things on and off the sidebar. I have also determined that the aberrant behaviour is occurring in my Test Account as well. Hmm.

My last resort has been to reinstall ML (from a copy made for a USB ML boot drive before original installation). Still the same!

Perhaps I should now turn to the Recovery partition...

or indeed the USB boot drive

I thought ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.sidebarlists.plist was a likely candidate for corruption, because in my Snowy it apparently accumulates data forever, i.e.


with which I haven't dealt since 2008.

I can't be certain, but it kinda looks like everything that's ever gotten into my sidebar has left its footprint in my plist.

If this behavior persists in ML, and if you consider it to be a bug, would you mind reporting it to Apple in my stead? (Edit: Because you can send them a current file, and I can't.)

Ah ha, nailed it. Following a recommendation in an Apple Support Community discussion on the same issue "Sidebar icons missing" (isn't Google and Safari 6 marvellous!), I deleted this:

Library / Application Support / SIMBL / Plugins / ColorfulSidebar.bundle

and restarted. Voila, icons back. Memo to self - uncoloured sidebar icons are quite OK, avoid hacks.

Thanks all for your interest and help.

Happy to hear that; thanks for filling us in.

I guess the SIMBL package was part of the app you didn't recall having installed in Lion.

Edit: Don't take that the wrong way...I'm not rubbing it in, merely pointing out that there may be other parts of that app left on your iMac that you may want to delete.

Thanks, I'll certainly be having a search (but not with Spotlight!). And not only for that particular app's do dos. For example while opening finder windows all over the place to investigate the sidebar issue I noticed 2 odd files sitting at the top level of my drive named ~ and 1 respectively. One's empty and the other contains thousands of funny looking zeros. No matter, they are not causing any problems...

I have found CleanApp to be an excellent tool for removal of applications, duplicate files, empty folders et cetera. As I recall, I first started using it after a recommendation at this site.

CleanApp provides different kinds of searches and locates everything associated with what it finds in a particular search. It provides cautions for items that you should not delete - e.g. if they are shared by other applications.

......worth a look.

> (but not with Spotlight!)

Check out EasyFind...great app and free.

Don't forget that you may be able to now get SIMBL off your iMac along with the rest of that app.