For those of you using ForkLift, a fantastic Finder replacement that I swear by, you should know that there’s an annoying bug in Lion. If you try to rename a folder by simply changing the case & nothing else, you’ll get this super-helpful error message:

The item “Foo” cannot be renamed. General error.

Press OK, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

An illustration for those who would like a concrete example: you have a folder named bar and you want to change it to Bar. In ForkLift, you select the folder, press Enter to go into rename mode, change the name to Bar, press Enter again. Bam! Error message. Angry exclamation.

Turns out, the developer of ForkLift knows about it. According to him, it’s an “API bug that was introduced in Lion”. He notified Apple on November 4, and now the waiting begins.

In the meantime, here’s the way to get around the bug. It’s stupid, but it does work.

Assuming you want to rename folder foo to Foo, select the folder, press Enter to go into rename mode, change the name to Foo- (note the hyphen!), press Enter again. While the folder is still selected, press Enter to go into rename mode again, change the name to Foo, press Enter again. From foo to Foo, in only 4 extra steps. For now, it’ll have to do.