Another Hack by the pickle: Resizing your Sherlock Window

DISCLAIMER: I take no responsibility for ANY damage you do to your computer, your software, yourself, or others as a result of this hack. YOU, the user, are ENTIRELY RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR OWN ACTIONS.

Now that I've taken a big sheet of armor and covered my legal butt, here's the hack.

You've probably noticed, as I have, that the new Find File application in Mac OS 8.5.x and 8.6, a.k.a. Sherlock, doesn't have a resizeable Find window for searching the Internet, or, for that matter, for searching anything. (Sherlock 2, part of Mac OS 9, fixes this major oversight.) Here's a quick and dirty ResEdit fix for that, complete with graphical instructions.

1. Duplicate the Sherlock application. To do this, open the Apple Menu Items folder inside your System Folder and select Sherlock with a single mouse click. Go to the File menu and select Duplicate or press command-D.
2. Use ResEdit or Super ResEdit to open the COPY of Sherlock. Open up the 'wctb' resource. (See Figure 1, red circle.)
   
   Figure 1. Sherlock resources.
3. Open the 'wctb' resource ID 1200. (See Figure 2.)
   
   Figure 2. 'wctb' resource in Sherlock.
4. Change the window type from this:
   
   Figure 3. 'WIND' resource ID 1200, original.
   
   
   to this by clicking on the leftmost icon the in the window type bar:
   
   Figure 4. 'WIND' resource ID 1200, changed.
5. Quit ResEdit and save the changes to your modified copy of Sherlock. (See Figure 5.)
   
   Figure 5. Standard Save dialog box for "ResEdit"-ing Sherlock.
6. Open the modified version of Sherlock just to make sure everything works OK. NOTE: YOU WILL NOT SEE A WINDOW RESIZE BOX IN THE CORNER OF THE FIND WINDOW. Simply click and drag the corner of the Find window. Trust me, it should work. Sorry, but I don't know how to make it visibly obvious that you changed it. And no, changing to a standard zoom-box window (the third one from the left in Figs. 3 and 4) would be bad. It makes things all weird. I checked.

• MacWorld magazine's Mac Tip of the Day, 28 December 1998.
• Mentioned on MacFixIt, Monday, 14 December 1998.
• Featured on ResExcellence, Monday, 14 December 1998.