Impressions of Path Finder
I’ve been evaluating CocoaTech’s Path Finder as a possible replacement for Apple’s own Finder filesystem browser. Path Finder is very highly rated, and while I’ve been impressed with many of its features I’m not as excited as the reviewers seem to be. I’m also not as critical of the Finder as many in the Mac blogging community are.
Ultimately I’m not sure which application I prefer, though I certainly won’t be purchasing Path Finder until it goes Universal. Path Finder has some compelling features, but the Finder excels in integration with the rest of the OS (an area in which Apple certainly has an advantage). A quick look at my impressions, then:
Pros
- Use Enter to open items. I’m a keyboard junkie, and one thing I do like about Windows is the ability to open a selected item in Windows Explorer with the Enter key. With Path Finder, you can do that.
- Keyboard navigation. Overall, Path Finder is easier and more efficient to navigate with the keyboard than the Finder.
- Slideshow. Tiger integrated slide show functionality into several apps (Mail and Preview, for example), but left out the Finder. With Path Finder, you can select an arbitrary set of images and start a slideshow.
- Avoids Finder glitches. The Finder has a few irritating issues, like its periodic tendency to get stuck in column view with no direct way to go back up the hierarchy. Path Finder avoids these.
- Tabbed windows. For me, this is perhaps the best feature of Path Finder. As in Firefox or Safari, you can create multiple browsing tabs within a single window, reducing clutter.
- Inspector drawer. Instead of the Finder’s floating Inspector, Path Finder puts its Get Info information in a drawer (and provides far more information, though I wish it were organized a little differently). I find this more convenient.
- Search by filename. While Path Finder integrates with Spotlight, it also includes a more traditional, speedy search-by-filename feature.
- Filter the current view. A text box at the top of the window lets you quickly filter the current view. So, for example, you could type "jpg" to see only the JPEG images, or "face" to see only files with "face" in their names.
- More display options. Path Finder gives you far more control over how your files and folders look. This includes things like fonts, colors, and icons but also power-user things like hidden files and package contents.
- Smaller sidebar. Path Finder’s sidebar is not only more configurable than the Finder’s, it can also use space more efficiently.
Cons
- Too many features. Those who have read other Path Finder reviews may be surprised by how short my list of Pros is. Path Finder is packed with features, and I don’t see this as a good thing. There are certainly numerous useful features I didn’t mention, such as the ability to create symbolic links and disk images. But I think Path Finder goes too far. I don’t need a PDF viewer, a text editor, a Terminal drawer, or a list of running applications, for example: I have Preview, TextEdit, Terminal, and Command-Tab, respectively. These additional features add clutter to the user interface, making it harder to locate the features I need; and presumably increase development, testing, and debugging time for CocoaTech.
- No undo. I frequently make mistakes in the Finder, moving and copying files when I didn’t intend to. Finder has an Undo command for these situations; Path Finder doesn’t.
- Incomplete implementation of tabs. OK, "incomplete" is in the eye of the beholder. But if I’m going to use tabs, I want to use them consistently. Path Finder doesn’t allow this. For example, if another app opens a directory I want the option to open that directory in a tab (presuming it’s not already open), rather than in a new window or the active tab. And I’d like an easy way (say, Command-click) to open an item in a new tab.
- Doesn’t activate on drag-and-drop. When I drag something from another app onto the Finder, I only need a corner of the target Finder window: When I hover the cursor over it, the entire window comes to the front. Path Finder doesn’t do this.
- Limited feedback during operations. The Finder does a good job of letting me know something is going on (for example, that a window’s contents are loading). Path Finder isn’t as effective in this area.
- Trash support. Path Finder’s support for the Trash isn’t good at all. Each disk’s Trash must be accessed separately, and the Trash can’t be emptied from the Dock. The latter I could live with because there’s a keyboard shortcut, but the former exposes a detail of the OS implementation that I don’t want to think about most of the time.
- Drag-and-drop creates generic text files. When I drag a URL from my browser’s address bar to the Finder desktop, I get a little URL that will reopen the page. When I do so in Path Finder, I get a text file: I have to open it, select the URL, and paste it into my browser. More importantly, it’s named "Text Clipping.rtf," so there’s no way to know what it is without opening it.
- No Arrange command. As far as I can tell, there is no equivalent of the Finder’s View > Arrange command, which I use frequently.
- Can’t rename Shelf items. OK, the Finder doesn’t do this either, but I wish something would. I often have several items in the Shelf (or Finder sidebar) whose actual names are the same; for example, "web-content" directories from several GoLive sites. It would be nice to change the name of the Shelf alias so I can tell these things apart.
- Shelf doesn’t integrate with Finder. One of the best features of the Finder sidebar is its availability in Open/Save dialogs. Since Path Finder doesn’t replace these, using Path Finder means losing this entirely. The Finder sidebar is stored as a property list in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.sidebarlists.plist, so perhaps integration is possible.
- Can’t use window titlebar paths. Many applications allow you to Command-click in the titlebar of a document window to see the document’s location in the filesystem. Selecting a folder in the list opens that item in the Finder. Path Finder doesn’t support this except in its own windows. (This one isn’t that important to me.)
- Finder seems more responsive. On slower machines, Path Finder seems to lag behind the Finder in speed and responsiveness.
- Little glitches. I mentioned that Path Finder avoids some of the Finder’s annoying glitches, but it’s not without glitches of its own.
Conclusion
Yes, the Cons list is longer than the Pros list, but I would argue that many of its items are of less importance. The two apps are close enough in my opinion that I wouldn’t recommend either strongly over the other. I’ll probably stick with the Finder for now, but Path Finder is an update away from having a clear edge.