Free OS X Mountain Lion Pocket Guide by Chris Seibold Page B

the list using the ↑ and ↓ keys, and when you run across
     a folder, pressing the → key
     opens a submenu of the enclosed items.
Automatic View
If you don’t feel like fine-tuning the way a stack
     is displayed, you can let Mountain Lion pick a view for you
     based on the stack’s contents. Simply right-click or Control-click the stack and then
     choose Automatic from the “View content as” section of the
     pop-up menu.
    Figure 3-21. List View of the Downloads folder
    Trash
    It doesn’t matter whether you’ve got a relatively tiny
     SSD drive in a MacBook Air or 4 terabytes of hard disk space in a
     fully tricked-out Mac Pro. Sooner or later, you’re going to want to
     get rid of some files, either because your drive(s) are feeling
     cramped or you just don’t want the data around anymore. That’s where
     the Trash comes in.
    The Trash is located on the right end of the Dock (or, if you’ve
     moved the Dock to the left or right of your screen, it’s on the
     bottom; see Dock to learn how to relocate the
     Dock). To banish files from your Mac, select them and then drag them
     from the Finder to the Trash (or press ⌘-Delete).
    When the Trash has something in it (whether it’s one item or a
     million), its icon changes from an empty mesh trash can to one stuffed
     with paper. This lets you know that the files you’ve moved to the
     Trash are still there, and that you can retrieve them (until you empty
     the Trash).
    To open the Trash and view its contents in a Finder window,
     click its Dock icon. (You can view the items in the Trash with the
     Finder, but you can’t actually open a file that’s in the Trash;
     attempting to do so will result in an error message.) If you find
     something in the Trash that shouldn’t be there, you can either drag it
     out of the Trash or select it and then click File → Put Back to send it back to where it was
     originally.
    To permanently delete items in the Trash,
     right-click or Control-click the Trash’s Dock icon and choose Empty
     Trash, or open the Finder and either choose Finder → Empty Trash or press Shift-⌘-Delete.
    Note that emptying the Trash doesn’t completely remove
     all traces of the files you deleted. Those files can be recovered with
     third-party drive-recovery utilities, at least until the disk space
     they previously occupied has been written over with new data. To make
     it harder for people to recover deleted data, in the Finder, choose
     Finder → Secure Empty Trash.This command overwrites the deleted files multiple
     times.
    If you work with a lot of sensitive files, you can tell the
     Trash to always write over files you delete by
     going to the Finder’s preferences (Finder → Preferences or ⌘-, while in the Finder) and,
     on the Advanced tab, checking the box next to “Empty Trash securely.”
     You probably want to leave the “Show warning before emptying the
     Trash” option checked because, once you securely empty the Trash,
     you’re not getting that data back.
    Dock preferences
    Here are a few quick and easy changes you can make
     without invoking the Dock’s preference pane. If you right-click or
     Control-click the divider between the two parts of the Dock (it’s a
     subtle, dark-gray line), you’ll get the pop-up menu shown in Figure 3-22 . This menu lets you
     choose whether to automatically hide the Dock when you’re not using
     it, change the magnification of icons in the Dock, change the Dock’s
     location, change the animation OS X uses when you minimize windows,
     and open the Dock’s preferences.
    Figure 3-22. A quick way to make Dock adjustments
    You can change the size of the Dock by dragging up or down over
     the dashed divider to increase or decrease the Dock’s size,
     respectively.
    The Application Switcher
    The Dock is the most obvious way to switch among
     applications while they’re running, and Mission Control is probably the
     niftiest way, but Mountain Lion gives you a third way to flip