dual panes? is that different from opening 2 tabs in a finder window? (again, serious question...)
Tabs aren't visible at the same time. Dual panes is more like opening two separate windows and lining them up side-by-side. In fact, there's a menu option to do just that automatically for you (i.e. the biggest pain in moving files in OS X that way is opening them up side-by-side).
Or two windows. Or split view!
It's the PITA of opening two windows that lead me to look for a such an application in the first place. I came from the Amiga platform many years ago and we had file utilities like Diskmaster and Directory Opus were practically iconic on the platform. They not only opened side-by-side (V2 of Diskmaster could open window panes on the main desktop or open on its own full size screen), but they were also programmable by the user to do more things with "buttons" (in the middle on Diskmaster and bottom on Directory Opus). For example, you could click on an image and then have an image viewer button and you could create default behaviors so that double clicking on an image would automatically view the image or movie or play a sound file or start a midi player or whatever by file type. It was very much like "auto preview" on OS X except that it existed over a decade before OS X was first released. Copying files was always just a simple matter of selecting/highlighting them on one panel and clicking COPY and it would copy them over to the other pane (you didn't drag files). I've got multiple drives on my Mac including a 3TB media drive (over 5TB of local storage total connected at any given time plus two other Macs and a Windows PC) so I move files around a lot and don't want it to be a hassle when I do.
Xtrafinder simply saves me time and gives me the dual-pane view I loved on the Amiga without the hassle of having to set up windows side-by-side. It also does other nice things like make the icons that used to be in color in Finder back in color again. Remember when iTunes and Finder had color icons and then they went all DARK GREY/METAL? Well now OS X has gone fuzzy color rainbow wonderland, but they forgot all about the monochrome text in iTunes playlists and the Finder. They're still remnants of grey metal world OS X and that's the one area I liked color other than the dock (thank God they didn't go monochrome there, but that will be next probably sine the GUI is regressing from 3D clues to 1980s FLAT looking so the era of late 70s and early 80s monochrome monitors can't be far behind!)
yeah, am not sure i understand what magnusvonmagnum means. i often run a window with 2 tabs to move files back & forth. so, what is the difference with 'dual panes'??
You can drag the files where you can see them and organize them and know they've copied OK rather than dragging them into a tab and then having to click on the tab to verify you dragged them over to the right one or whatever (i.e. I like visual verification and sometimes need to move files in both directions. It just makes more sense to have them visible at the same time than on separate tabs. Tabs make more sense for a browser since web pages aren't related and you don't move things between them (but you still have tabs in Xtrafinder as well; in fact it offered tabs before Finder ever did). I honestly never understood why Finder didn't add a dual-pane mode all these years or at least offer to open/snap two windows side-by-side for you with a menu click. I suggested feedback to Apple multiple times about this and they ignored it like all feedback they get (I honestly believe they just dump it in the bit bucket as soon as they get it) as having such an option wouldn't hurt a thing and would negate the need for Xtrafinder for the most part.
Yes, you can move to tabs and yes you could just open two windows. But once you have Finder do it at a single click to go to that mode, you don't want to go back. It's like getting power windows and then going back to manual wind windows. It's just like, why would you want to.
I never understood why the developers of XtraFinder/Total Finder never bothered creating a file manager from scratch. Every year they have to deal with incompatibilities due to the fact that they are hijacking Apple’s application and injecting code into it. The tweaks are so sophisticated that they could have just made their own applications.
That is a good question. If they could do it for the Amiga, they should be able to do it here. I think standardization may be the reason. It's still the Finder, just enhanced. But seeing as OS X has a CLI/SHELL, obviously, they could move files by command in the background and use their own GUI to show it. That's how it worked on the Amiga, which believe it or not was a lot like an early pre-cursor to OS X in many ways. Seeing AmigaDos took much inspiration from UNIX (preemptive multitasking in 1985, something OS X wouldn't make available to Mac users until 2001) plus a dual command line and X Windows-like GUI plus all the multimedia goodness Macs are known for today. Yeah, I never even considered a Mac until OS X came out.
