Make sure Connected Servers is checked in the window that appears: 8. Click an open space on your desktop, then click FInder then Preferences in the menu bar at the top of the screen. Once that’s done you can simply drag the file wherever you like. Create a folder in your local home directory called Network Folders: 6. You can also use the Command+L keyboard shortcut to do that. Proceed to File in the Menu bar and select Make Alias. Click the file or folder and make sure that it’s highlighted. If you want to do this in a single step, you can make a regular alias by holding down Command and Option while you drag an item (again, say your Documents folder) to the Desktop.Įdit: if you want, here's a Shortcut (using the Mac Shortcuts app) to make symlinks on your desktop for any file or folder currently selected in the Finder. Use Finder to locate the file that you wish to make a desktop shortcut of. The Finder will treat it like any other alias, with one notable exception: regular aliases won't break if you move them. You can cd into it, use it as an rsync source or destination, etc. This will place a symlink of Documents on your Desktop. If you need to be able to use commandline utilities with the same kind of shortcut, do: (That's how you can rename Documents alias to Documents, on your Desktop, for example, without changing the source ~/Documents folder at all.) The one exception is the alias name: if you rename an alias, the name of the original remains unchanged. It'll be no different than dealing with any other folder in the Finder. The Finder will treat this exactly like any other folder, and whatever changes you make will all be changes made to the source folder.
(For clarity, the Finder will treat an alias of a folder exactly like a folder, so if you alias, say, your Documents folder, the system wants you to be able to easily distinguish one from the other.) Move that alias to your desktop, where you can now rename it and chop the word "alias" off of the end, if you like. (In current versions of macOS, that's Control-Command-A.) For all practical purposes, the alias is the original folder, in two locations - the original folder, and wherever you make the alias.Ĭlick on the folder for which you need an alias. If you alias a folder, anything you put in the folder alias is exactly like copying or moving items into the original folder. An alias is an object that refers to the original item. It's not entirely clear what you're trying to do, but you can likely do what you want with either macOS aliases, or symlinks.