Column Browser Go Home

I've found that iTunes' Column Browser feature is one of the best ways to navigate the Music library. But I'm often annoyed that I can't easily restore the browser window to a full view of tracks after digging down to a particular set of tracks. To do so requires a lot of scrolling up and clicking. Correspondent Josh Rafofsky emailed me complaining of the same frustration and his solution was pretty good: Command-B to Hide the Column Browser, fn-Left Arrow to got to the top of the browser, and the Command-B again to Show the Column Browser. But even this gets tiresome and he asked if there might be a one-step scripting solution.

You know there is.

I put together this script which uses a combination of standard AppleScripting and GUI Scripting to emulate Josh's shortcuts solution:

tell application "iTunes" to activate
tell application "System Events"
	key code 11 using command down
	tell application "iTunes" to reveal track 1 of (get view of front window)
	key code 0 using {command down, shift down}
	key code 11 using command down
end tell

Save this as whatever you like—I call it "Column Browser Go Home"—save it to the ~/Library/iTunes/Scripts folder, and assign it a shortcut (make sure you have enabled GUI Scripting, too, as outlined in this article on using key codes). When launched after you've Column Browsed to a discrete set of tracks it will restore the entire list of tracks and jump to the top of the selected playlist. In my case this is usually the Music library playlist, but it will work with any playlist that's being viewed with the Column Browser.

[UPDATE] And after all that, @tonyhazeldine tweets: "The same can be done by clicking on the column titles at the top of the column browser." Yes, but each column has to be clicked.