I’m usually a good sport about macOS updates. I find stuff to like, and deal with the bugs as they get worked out. I’m not feeling as generous about Big Sur. Among many annoyances I have is a relatively (well, very) small one: Apple hid the proxy icon behind a rollover with a delay in Finder.

If you’re unfamiliar with them, proxy icons are the little icon to the left of a document title in the title bar. They act as a proxy for the document/file, allowing you to drag from the title bar to any application that accepts that type of document.

Like I said, this change is tiny, but it’s the kind of thing where I can’t really understand the motivation for doing it. It seems like a regression to me, no matter how I look at it. I haven’t found a way to sneakily bring them back, but I did find a way to at least remove the ~1s delay between hovering and the icon being exposed.

Thanks to Herman van Boeijen for this one:

defaults write com.apple.Finder NSToolbarTitleViewRolloverDelay -float 0

Running that in Terminal and then restarting Finder (killall Finder) will make the proxy icon display immediately when your cursor rolls over it. It’s a start., but I’m still uncharacteristically grumpy about this whole OS.

Update: The above only affects Finder and has to be repeated for other bundle identifiers. You can set it globally (for all apps) using:

defaults write -g NSToolbarTitleViewRolloverDelay -float 0