Finder Alternatives?

[ArtOfWarfare]

I have a lot of ideas for dramatically improving GUI shells (IE, Finder for OS X and Explorer for Windows) and I decided I was going to make one that actually incorporates all of them to make the best one ever.

I've played around with a few alternatives, and none of them seem to have particularly meaningful additions. Split views. Tabs (which Mavericks now has.) Some have some funky Terminal / Pasteboard mix-ins. I'm curious, does anyone use alternative Finders and what features would you consider worth paying for? I'm expecting to charge a hefty ($50-$100) price so I'd like to make sure there's nothing meaningful missing.

 

[aaagat111]

I've been a long time user of TotalFinder and Alfred. With these two additions I have very few complaints about file management/organization

TotalFinder gives me features such as tabbed browsing (which it included a long time before 10.9), split views, keyboard shortcuts for things like show hidden files, advanced sorting features, and it's own "visor", which I actually don't use but know a lot of people that are attached.

Alfred gives me way more features than I could list out here. In short though, instant search, shortcuts for everything, custom script management, etc.

Overall I think the native finder is pretty decent, but with a few additions from the tools above it is killer.

Just wondering, what were you thinking of doing differently than the above?

 

[saberahul]

I have a lot of ideas for dramatically improving GUI shells (IE, Finder for OS X and Explorer for Windows) and I decided I was going to make one that actually incorporates all of them to make the best one ever.

I've played around with a few alternatives, and none of them seem to have particularly meaningful additions. Split views. Tabs (which Mavericks now has.) Some have some funky Terminal / Pasteboard mix-ins. I'm curious, does anyone use alternative Finders and what features would you consider worth paying for? I'm expecting to charge a hefty ($50-$100) price so I'd like to make sure there's nothing meaningful missing.

I personally like ForkLift a lot - especially it's sync to feature which allows me to sync my USB with multiple folders in a snap. Has a bunch to offer so check it out at their website (binary something I believe is the company). I should note that I got it for 99¢ in the app store but would easily pay $5 for it (I'm cheap).

Edit: forgot to mention multi rename feature… truly awesome.

 

[firedept]

I have to agree with aaagat111 and his/her view on TotalFinder. Been using it pretty much since it was first introduced.

One feature I did like about the old Finder was Labels. Tagging is alright, but is not a label. A small dot next to a file name does not cut it for me. I would much more prefer seeing the tagging doing both the job of a tag and label.

I do have a workaround for it, I just color my file icon to match the tag color. I actually like that even better than Labels. It could possibly be a feature you could add. Posted photo so you could see my added feature I created to solve the Labels issue.

You'll see I have also created my own file icon as well which helped with my tagging system. It works with standard blue file icon which I use in my sub-folders and tag the same way with file icon color matching the tag color.

I am not sure of what else you could add to it to make it worth $50-100 though. TotalFinder is cheap at $18.00. It only took me a small amount of work to build a workaround. It would have to have many additional features over TotalFinder for me to even look at.

Not trying to discourage you though as there are many programs out there that are well worth that kind of money.

 

[maflynn]

On occasion I use PathFinder which is a good app, while I own it, I still find myself going back to the traditional Finder. It has some nice features that I may tap from time to time.