How to Add Folders to the Finder Sidebar on a Mac (and Get It Back If It Is Gone)

The Finder sidebar is fully editable: which built-in items appear is a set of checkboxes in Finder Settings, your own folders go in by dragging, and everything can be reordered by dragging within its group.

Show or hide the built-in items

With Finder active, open Finder ▸ Settings (⌘,).
Click the Sidebar tab.
Tick or untick the items you want. They’re grouped: Favourites (Recents, Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Applications, your home folder), iCloud, Locations (hard disks, external drives, connected servers), and Tags.

Unticking removes the row from every Finder window; ticking it again brings it straight back. If you turn off everything in a group, the group heading disappears too.

Add your own folders

Drag any folder onto the Favourites section of the sidebar and drop it where you want it. The original doesn’t move — the row is a shortcut to it.

You can also select a folder and press ⌃⌘T.

Reorder the list

Drag a row up or down within its group. Items can’t jump between groups — a folder you added stays in Favourites, a disk stays in Locations.

Remove a folder you added

Right-click it and choose Remove from Sidebar, or drag it out of the sidebar until it disappears. Only the shortcut goes; the folder itself is untouched. Built-in items don’t offer this — they’re the checkboxes above.

If a Finder window has no sidebar at all, nothing is broken — it is hidden, and one shortcut brings it back: ⌃⌘S (Control-Command-S), or View ▸ Show Sidebar. It returns at the width you left it.

Two ways it disappears by accident: that shortcut pressed by mistake, and the divider between the sidebar and the file list dragged all the way to the left edge, which collapses it. Drag the left edge back inwards, or press ⌃⌘S twice.

The checkboxes above decide what’s in the sidebar. To get rid of the whole pane and give the file list the full window, press ⌃⌘S (Control-Command-S), or use View ▸ Hide Sidebar. The same shortcut brings it back at the width you left it.

This is worth knowing on a laptop screen: the sidebar takes roughly a quarter of the window, and that quarter is exactly where long file names and the size and date columns need room. Hide it while you work inside one folder, bring it back when you need to jump somewhere else.

You can also drag the divider between the sidebar and the file list all the way to the left edge — that collapses it too.

Doing it in ComfortFiles

ComfortFiles puts all of it in the sidebar itself, no settings window involved: right-click a built-in entry for Hide from Quick Access, right-click the Quick Access heading for a checkmarked list that brings hidden entries back, and drag any row — including Recents — to reorder. Folders are pinned from their own right-click menu. See customising Quick Access in ComfortFiles.

Hiding the whole pane works the same way, on the same ⌃⌘S, with one difference: each tab remembers its own sidebar. Keep the tree open in the tab you browse from and hidden in the one you keep a long file list in, and both come back that way after a restart. The full list is in the ComfortFiles keyboard shortcuts.

Either way the idea is the same: the sidebar is meant to hold the handful of places you actually use, not the default set.