XtraFinder Another Finder Replacement for Free?

Ok gang,

Here’s another Finder modification/replacement that might suit those of you who are into tabbed interfaces. Below is a picture of it in action. The application is called XtraFinder, and like many great Mac utilities, it is available for free. The app modifies the way Finder works to add tabs and a heck of a lot of other functionality.

There are some noticeable performance hits in certain operations. In the picture above, I show you a connection in one tab over SMB to a Windows 7 computer. When copying files to the tab of that connection, I all-but-lost Finder access during the operation. This appears to be related to how XtraFinder handles its insertion into the operating system. Compared to the way Path Finder does copying in a multithreaded, ordered fashion, XtraFinder locks the copy operations and even switching tabs is kind of slow. I’d recommend you avoid large network copying when using XtraFinder because of this.

Changing settings also causes Finder to close and on several occasions I had to restart (reopen) Finder by clicking the Finder icon on the dock.

Preferences can be accessed by this menubar icon .

As shown above, there is a question mark icon in the upper left of the preferences window. Click it followed by any of the less-than-obvious options if you need to understand what the option does. For example,

using this on Narrow Tab Bar gets this “help” image to indicate the space saved when using this option.

Since there aren’t many hard-to-understand options, there isn’t much in the way of help. You will have to experiment a little.

Some of my favorite options are:

1. New File… - allows you to create blank files of any type you make a template for just as easily as you make new folders
2. New Terminal Here
3. Pinnable Window - makes a Finder window you can pin above all other windows (by itself, not with the rest of Finder)
4. Show Hidden Items - toggles visibility of hidden items. I used to open Path Finder for this (and before that I’d use a quick command line script).
5. Select… - allows wildcard-based selection of files. Very handy!

The best feature about the app is the way nearly all options let you record your own shortcut keys. Side note: I think having some defaults that could be overridden would be a smarter approach.

Please share your thoughts on this project and how it compares to other Finder alternatives or enhancements. Do you use one?

 

 

 

Originally heard about XtraFinder on this makeuseof.com blog post from January.

XtraFinder on Facebook