There are a few good Finder alternatives for macOS, including Path Finder, ForkLift, Commander One, and Double Commander (FOSS).

I ended up with ForkLift after much trial and error. Commander One was nice. Double Commander is also great but not "native" on Mac. Path Finder is super powerful but has a rep for being overcomplicated and also crashy, but I can't personally vouch because it wasn't quite what I was looking for anyway.

Forklift is the one I settled on as well. I had the experience you describe with Path Finder before and finally I gave up.

Forklift has a couple of things that annoy me daily though. Often I will have to refresh a pane to see a file I know has recently been added. Eg in downloads. I may even have navigated to downloads after the download finished and it's still not visible until I refresh.

The other is that it doesn't reuse existing tabs if I "reveal in finder" or whatever, so after a while there's a million tabs open, most pointing to the same directory.

Oof. Those hit close to home for me, too.

Path Finder went to a subscription-only model, no way to outright purchase a license sadly.

The quality of Path Finder went downhill many years ago as well.

also, https://marta.sh/

What is the deal with MacOS file dialogs? A couple days ago I was trying to open a project in Cursor, and I click on "home" and my name, and then it has the directories grouped by year created. So I type in the search box, but it's now searching some other context, like the whole system or something? I don't even have tons of files/directories in my home directory "ls | wc -l" gives 36.

It's like they designed it while watching High Fidelity: "I sorted my albums autobiographically. So if I'm looking for <this album> I have to remember that it's under albums I bought for a girl but ended up not giving to her." "That sounds like a great idea!"

If you start searching, I think it defaults to scope "This Mac". That's probably right for most cases. If you want to open a Word doc named Fnord, you'd kind of hope Finder would... find it... wherever it was. But you can also click next to "This Mac" to switch it the context of the directory you're in.

Also, cmd-shift-G (the Finder shortcut for "Go to Folder...") will let you start typing a path.

> If you start searching, I think it defaults to scope "This Mac".

Correct, and it's the first setting I change.

Finder > Settings > Advanced > When performing a search: "Search the Current Folder"

Sounds like it was sorted by “most recent” (not the column, but the view mode).

That said the Open dialog is a sad sack stand in for even the flawed Finder. 20 year Mac user here: I developed the muscle memory to just have a Finder window open to the file I want so I can drag and drop from that into the Open dialog.

> then it has the directories grouped by year created

That's a setting you set.

Right click on empty space > uncheck "Use groups"

Or in that context menu, select "Show View Options" and customize it to your liking. My liking is "Group by kind" (folders to the top) then "Sort by name"

Thanks everyone, these pointers were really helpful. At one time I think I set it to "most recent" and forgot about it, since I'm not using the finder a whole lot. I hadn't even thought about going into settings, so I went there and did some tweaks, including defaulting to searching within folder by default, and changing some locations that it defaults to, which I think will really help.

I've found this article recently: https://www.xda-developers.com/4-finder-alternatives-on-maco...

Hahaha, that's great. Halfway down this article, there's a link to an old article on File Pilot.

I don't think it's technically possible to even replace Finder. If you type "open ." in terminal, it will open in Finder.

There is not an optional "set this as default" like browsers. Something we should really push Apple to do. Finder is trash.

Is it not possible to alias the open command?

It’s possible to get pretty close. For example, Forklift’s instructions (go to https://binarynights.com/manual, search for “Default File Viewer”) nearly replaces it, except you still have a Finder icon in the dock.

ForkLift is really good.

If everything goes well with Windows and the project becomes financially stable, a macOS version is planned.

Mac user tend to buy premium apps more, so you should just made for mac anyway.

It does seem like there are more well made, premium apps on Mac. I’ve always been jealous. Eventually a clone is made that supports Windows, but it always seems a bit worse.

On macOS my daily driver is Nimble Commander (https://magnumbytes.com/). Super fast, powerful and inspired by Total Commander. It used to be paid but now is free and open source so give it a try. It deserves to be better known.