The developer of Path Finder provides a generous 60-day trial for the product. Path Finder is a deep program with a whole slew of features. Took a couple of weeks, but now it is something that I am comfortable in and wouldn’t want to give up. Switching to Path Finder presented a challenge for a while. That is a lot of muscle memory accumulated over the years. I have been using the macOS Finder from the System 7 days. You can be in Path Finder and not miss the Finder at all. How does it do in that quest? It replaces the Finder with ease. It attempts to provide a feature-rich competitor to the Finder and is not an adjunct to it. It is designed to be a replacement of the Finder. Path Finder has a broader vision than its competitors. The focus for this article is Path Finder. I might cover ForkLift 3 in a subsequent article. There have been other products like ForkLift 3 and Path Finder who have tried to provide a viable alternative to the Finder through a re-imagining of what the typical file manager should be. They include, DCommander, Double Commander, fman, and MacCommander to name a few. There are products developed primarily for users migrating from Windows. Several products have tried to provide an alternative to the Finder. Price: $36 or $18 for an upgrade from previous versions. Version reviewed: 4.6.Path Finder Icon Path Finder Shines as a Finder Replacement As far as I know, the only competitor for this program is File Buddy. The producer managed to add enough built-in features in order to remove the need of other programs, such as archiving programs, disk image creators, etc. In conclusion: I believe this is the Swiss Army Knife of the file browsers. ![]() The interface of this program is highly customizable. Pluses: it gives you various options, a tabbed browsing interface, a compressing and decompressing built in engine based on StuffIt, a built in DMG disk image creation engine, a very good preview functionality for images, documents, or text files, it provides you a Drop Stack which improves the way you move files around. Finder can't preview the text files properly, and it can't preview at all documents such as the ones in RTF format. Unlike Finder, this application can preview text files or documents. Towards the end of testing this program, I found another nice functionality, the preview of files. ![]() The archiving engine is completed by the disk creator engine, through which Path Finder can easily create DMG images. The good news doesn't end here, the application has some of the StuffIt Standard functionalities such as, compressing files, even it SIT and SITX archives. This means that you can decompress every file that is supported by StuffIt Expander. The application has a built-in StuffIt engine. That menu also provides you functionalities like compress, compress and e-mail, burn, or clear the list for either the top file or the whole list. You can switch between them by using the Drop Stack's drop down menu. This removes the need of opening two Finder windows in order to drag-and-drop the file or files that you want to move. ![]() The Drop Stack is something new, because you can drop files here that you would like to move in another location. The Shelf and the Volumes are similar to the ones from the Finder, but with better functionality. Other things from the interface that caught my attention were the Shelf, the Volumes, and the Drop Stack areas. If the subdirectory has another subdirectory, then you can browse the whole substructure from that menu. In fact, it opens a drop-down menu from where you can pick what you would like to do like open it, open it in a new tab, or select a subdirectory. Clicking one of those directories won't make it jump to it. This bar is placed above the tabs and it is ergonomically designed. Every tab has the entire directory structure of the opened folder, thus you can access any folder quickly just by clicking on them.Īnother great thing is the possibility to jump between your home and your system directories, like Favorites, Documents, Music, Movies, Pictures, Desktop, and Applications. I really like the tabbed browsing implementation. It provides you an interface with great functionality and better access than 'Finder'. Things became much better than this first impression, when I started to discover what this application included. My first impression when opening this program was that I had an upgraded Finder in front of my eyes. Path Finder is a strong alternative file browser for Mac OS X.
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