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Best Finder alternative

While I will acknowledge that Path Finder went through some tough times in the last few years, I never stopped using it, and find it to be perfectly fine for my needs - no remote servers, just one local connected via gigabit ethernet. It's possible that I don't use some of the more esoteric features, and so don't encounter the bugs that others have, but I honestly haven't had any issues with it recently. I would be very curious to see how Path Finder "can cause damage to Finder, leading to the need to reformat and reinstall your Mac" - I certainly haven't encountered anything like this.

Cocoatech has also made some changes in their pricing and license model, after a lot of negative feedback - the license price isn't wildly higher than the subscription price, and subscription now works more like a license, in that the software keeps working after the subscription ends - you just can't update until you re-subscribe. A case could probably be made for going with a monthly subscription and turning off auto-renew, and just subscribing every few months to get updates.

I have tried Forklift and just never really liked it - one of the things I really like about Path Finder is the ability to change its appearance to not be so sparse (like Finder, which is now so white and bland), and Forklift always felt too much like Finder for me - flat, white, dull. Being able to change the fonts and appearance of Path Finder gives me a little bit of the feel of earlier OS X days, when it was possible to make your computer feel more individual and distinctive. I also like being able to set different views for specific folders - I want folders at the top of some windows, but not others, and want some folders sorted by file creation/modification date, and others by name - and Path Finder makes that easy and reliable. I use Spaces heavily on my Mac, and have Path Finder set to its own Space (with a couple smaller apps along side), and it handles everything I need from a file manager.
 
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I gave Path Finder a try. It was already mentioned it's buggy, but it also was mentioned it has nice features, so I wanted to learn about them.
And I agree, the features are nice. Having modules to move in basically every pane is great.

And I also agree that it's bugged. Mostly the UI, like the information window places right-alligned stuff to far to the right, so that one needs to scroll sideways, or close the module and resize the window and then open again to have the stuff placed correctly. It's weird.

Sorting stuff in list view reliably freezes the App. If they ever overhaul the UI and fix their bugs I will give it another try. For now I will just move on to the next Finder alternative on the list and see if it's a buggy as Fork Lift and Path Finder.
 
I now tried QSpace Pro.
The german translation is really bad, so I set it to english, which is much better.
The panes aren't as flexible as Path Finder with it's modules but it's good enough for me I think.

It has nice tiny features like resizing the names column when needed. A lot of options to make it behave the way you want it to. So far I like it and will try it some more days.
But it also has that bug that freezes the app when you click a column header 2 or 3 times too fast.
And calculating folder sizes uses way too much CPU. I will see if I can live with that.
 
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Did anyone here buy QSpace Pro? They have a sale right now, and it's quite cheap.
17$ including the 4 Extensions. I really consider buying it. But there are some more alternatives I didn't try yet. Now I'm arguing with myself about what I should do. 😅

After some more usage I really like the pathbar where you can hover to get the other folders in that hovered folder. It's quite fast to browse the filesystem with that.

The mass rename feature can do less than the Finder, but with the extension it seems way more powerful.

Two annoyances so far though.
The QSpace Desktop doesn't seem to remember the positions of the icons.
And in Music.app using cmd+shift+r would show the selected track in Finder, but with QSpace set to the standard File Manager it just brings QSpace to the front without opening the folder.


I also tried the new Fork Lift 4 Beta 3, I found new ways to crash/freeze it. Also it seems very barebones now that I know Path Finder's and QSpace Pro's features.
 
I wanted to try MaxCommander now, but that seems to be AppStore only.
Same is true for Folders File Manager.

I then tried Marta, that seems quite nice. There is no gui for settings, you have to edit a file, that might be a big no-go for some, I favor a GUI but I can live with the textfile settings.
I didn't come accross any bugs, there is a lot of stuff you can edit. But two things made me discard it.

1. No tree view in list view
2. Can't select the other pane with keyboard

Also it didn't get an update in two years.

Those three apps were the last on my list. QSpace Pro is the one I like the most, and so I just bought it. I will try to completly replace Finder with it.
 
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it wasnt me said:
Does feature-complete software need updates?
Click to expand...

Yes it might need updates to be compatible with the latest macOS updates.
If there aren't any updates in a long time one never knows if it's not supported anymore or if it just doesn't need any updates. Also there is always something that can be improved or added.
Also I didn't mean to say that I don't use it because of that, it's just something I like to be aware of.
 
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I had too many problems with Marta interacting with my NAS, so unfortunately Marta is now off my list of recommendations. Although I really like Nimble Commander, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, so I continue to try different file managers.

After its developer explained to me how to recreate Total Commander's "select and jump to next file" (Space) in MaxCommander (Ctrl+Space - it's probably documented, but I'm a creature of habit), I decided to give MaxCommander a serious shot. After all, it doesn't cost much.

It is somewhat unusual that MaxCommander does not request access rights by default (at least it did not do so for me), but fortunately it is documented how to give it these rights. There is a separate menu item for specific access - enabling access to "Macintosh HD" is recommended, which then seems to automatically share all volumes. The German translation is a bit bumpy, but I've really seen worse translations (CRAX Commander also needs improvement here) - at least no texts are cut off in MaxCommander because they are too long. The application reacts quickly to inputs and the interface can be customised to just the right degree; for example, I have hidden the buttons and the hint bar at the bottom because I simply don't need them. Interaction with my NAS (connected via the Finder) works perfectly.

A minor annoyance is that the setting for the text editor does not allow free text input, but only allows selection via the Open dialogue. I tend to use obscure software that is not in the Applications folder (I would like to set the sam text editor). When setting the text editor, I seem to have found a bug: I cancelled the dialogue, after which the menu item was deactivated and could not easily be reactivated.

So much for my first impression. For the fact that MaxCommander seems to be rather unknown (I had heard of its predecessor MacCommander, but I didn't have a Mac at the time), it is an amazingly good piece of software.
 
Based on the above I did buy MaxCommander, and so far I'm not impressed it seems there are no way to save tab sets, no way to have the bookmarks in a side panel, very few configuration options. I'll persevere with testing it out but it seems lacking in features compared to Forklift. Unless of course I'm missing many many things. :)
 
dbrewood said:
Based on the above I did buy MaxCommander, and so far I'm not impressed it seems there are no way to save tab sets, no way to have the bookmarks in a side panel, very few configuration options.
Click to expand...

Sorry for making you spend money on it, I guess…? :)

The developer is quite responsive, it might be worth sending an e-mail. As far as I understand, it is a one-man project.

I’ll need to send another e-mail as well - MaxCommander can’t run command-line applications and I wonder why. I think that’s another configuration item hidden somewhere.
 
ForkLift beta 4 has been released. Adds a few more features and fixes a few issues. I'm really liking the progress the beta is making, and am already using it in a production environment on my Mac Studio.
 
MacGizmo said:
ForkLift beta 4 has been released. Adds a few more features and fixes a few issues. I'm really liking the progress the beta is making, and am already using it in a production environment on my Mac Studio.
Click to expand...
I just downloaded it. It is really nice. I like the themes.

It's agony for me that they omitted a crucial feature of list view, one that I requested and they agreed made sense (and a feature that Finder and Path Finder have). Here's a short clip showing the issue. I have the "project" favorite selected, expanded to see files I'm working on. I click on "Downloads" to check files there, then back to "project". The expansion is lost.



While setting up a simple example, I encountered some bugs in that view when expanding content. It's obviously not a view that's high on their radar. alt-right arrow is supposed to do a complete expansion of all descendent folders. I have to expand and collapse a number of times (each expansion expands more than the last) till I get to a full expansion.
 
Well, I was playing around with the ForkLift favorites yesterday for my previous post. Today I noticed a bunch of my Finder favorites were missing. Those favorites have been stable for months. I'm absolutely certain that ForkLift did this.

-- edit --

And it modified the font sizes (in Finder) for various folders that I had looked at in ForkLift. Boy, this is going to be a tough morning. Not looking forward to what else I discover.
 
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Forklift 4 beta 3 was the last "stable" release, with beta 4 fixing many issues, but introducing more. The last three updates have been a total disaster. The amount of bugs has gone through the roof, and the developer is actually taking away some (albeit minor) features.

It's gotten so bad that the ONLY reason I still use it is because it is still a BILLION TIMES better than the macOS Finder when connecting to external servers over the Internet (for example, with Forklift you can actually disconnect from the server in under 15 minutes, and opening every single folder doesn't require a 5 to 15-second wait while the OS caches the view settings/file list. Woohoo!)
 
it wasnt me said:
And later it will be a subscription.
Click to expand...
I thought we cleared that up for everyone early in this thread. ForkLift 4 will have an OPTION for full subscription pricing, but once you buy it, you can use that version forever (as long as it runs on the OS).
 
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