There's no way to separate the items in the "Places" section of the 10.5 Finder sidebar,
and that's really annoying, especially if you have multiple folders of the same name
there (such as /Applications and ~/Applications), or if
you're using it to hold applications as well. There's a way around it however, and
that's what this is all about...
Note on the screenshots, the lowercase category names are done by following the directions on this hint.
10.5's Finder is great. At least, I think so, especially compared to the Finder in earlier generations of the OS, and the Sidebar, though slightly maligned elsewhere, is one of my favorite parts of it. It's so much, well, prettier than the sidebar in 10.4 and below.
One problem I've run into, however, is that aliases end up having the name of the
destination folder, at least in certain cases, and that means that I can't have things
like an /Applications and ~/Applications entry in the sidebar,
even by using an alias to one or the other, since you couldn't tell which folder was
which. (In all fairness, I could change the icon, but I'm stubborn.) In addition,
there's no way to make a physical distinction between apps and folders and files, etc,
and you end up with the mess that's shown in the screen shot.
Well, if you can make transparent icons, and folder names that are nothing but line
drawing characters, it's not hard to end up with a separator. In fact that's just
what I did: create a transparent .png, use that to create an application
icon, and then create a couple of "applications" that could get stuck into the sidebar
that look like separators.
Well, hot damn.
The .zip file contains a folder with seven separators. There's also an
applescript application for launching the Terminal from the sidebar with a folder
dropped on it, which I found the original Terminal application wouldn't support.
Installation really just means dragging the separators to the sidebar after putting them somewhere on your machine. The terminal droplet is the same thing. Just drag it to the sidebar and drop folders on it.
Let me know if you have any trouble, at lygaret at gmail dot com, and I'll see if I can help out!