There’s a Hidden Preference to Auto-Resize Columns in the Finder on MacOS 14 and 15

Good tip from “DifferentDan” on the Realmac customer forum, posted back in November:

I saw on macOS Tahoe 26.1, Apple finally added an option in the Column View settings to automatically right size all columns individually and that setting would persist, but I don’t really like Liquid Glass (yet) so I haven’t updated to Tahoe.

Looks like someone found a workaround however for those that are still on Sequoia. Just open up Terminal on your Mac, copy in the below, and press return.

 defaults write com.apple.finder _FXEnableColumnAutoSizing -bool YES; killall Finder

Marcel Bresink’s TinkerTool is a great free app for adjusting hidden preferences using a proper GUI, and it turns out TinkerTool has exposed this hidden Finder preference for a few years now. You learn something every day. I enabled this a few days ago on MacOS 15 Sequoia, and it seems exactly like the implementation Apple has exposed in the Finder’s View Options window in Tahoe, which I wrote about Friday. No better, no worse.

★ Monday, 26 January 2026