2.5 Selecting Icons for Fun and Profit

     You’ll often find yourself performing different actions on one icon — or a number of icons at one time. For example, you can copy or move files from one location on your hard drive to another or delete a group of files that you no longer need. (The idea of drag-and-drop file management using icons originated on the Mac, but I wait until Chapter 3 of this minibook to describe these operations in detail.) In this section, I focus on the basics of selecting one or more icons to specify the files and folders you want to use for whatever you’re going to do next.

Selecting a single icon

     First, here are the various ways that you can select a single icon for an impending action:

✦ Place your cursor over the file and click once. OS X darkens the icon to indicate that it’s selected — a mysterious process called highlighting.
✦ Type the first few letters of the icon’s name. After you type a letter, OS X highlights the first icon that matches that character.
✦ If an icon in a window is already highlighted, you can move the highlight to the next icon across by pressing the right-arrow key. Likewise, the other three directional arrow keys move the highlight in the other directions. To move through the icons alphabetically, press Tab to go forward and Shift+Tab to go backward.

Selecting multiple icons

     To select a gaggle of icons for an action, use one of these methods:

✦ Contiguous: If the icons are next to each other, click and drag in a window (and not directly on a specific item) to highlight them all. As you drag, OS X displays a selection box, and any icons you touch with that box are highlighted when you release the button (as shown in Figure 2-14). Think “lasso” and you’ll get the picture.
     You can also select multiple adjacent icons by clicking the first item to highlight it and then holding down the Shift key while clicking the last icon in the series that you want to select.
✦ Noncontiguous: If the icons are not next to each other, you can hold down the ⌘ key while you click each item that you want to select.

     Just selecting an icon doesn’t launch or do anything. You’re just marking your territory.