ColorfulSidebar offers a simple but pleasing visual modification for OS X 10.7's Finder.

OS X 10.7 brought greyscale icons to the Mac OS X Finder window sidebar, but if you'd rather have some color back in your desktop window sidebars, you can get this done easily through a third party plugin.

If you've been following some of our other Lion tips, you may already have SIMBL installed, otherwise it's a small download.

Installation Instructions

Download and install SIMBL, which you can get here
Download the ColorfulSidebar SIMBL plugin (direct link) or visit the developers home and mount the DMG file
Move the ColorfulSidebar.bundle into the following SIMBL plugin folder:~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins/
Either login and logout of Mac OS X, or just kill the Finder through the Terminal to relaunch it: killall Finder

One oddity about this solution is that you may need to kill the Finder again to bring the color icons back after a full system reboot, otherwise this works trouble free.

If you ever want to get the grey icons back, you just need to remove the ColorfulSidebar.bundle file from the SIMBL plugins folder and then relaunch the Finder again.

On a somewhat related note, you can also bring back the personal folders in your OS X Lion Finder window sidebars. Those icons will gain color again too.

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