I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Finder. There are many things I love about this file manager, but there are certain things that just drive me nuts. One thing I really hate about working in Apple’s Finder is that I find myself opening multiple finder windows to let me to work with files across different locations. Yes this can be done with one finder window but it never seems to work quite right and it inevitably leads to a lot more clicks than necessary. Somebody at Binary Nights must have had the same issues, and today I get to present to you, Forklift.
When you open up Forklift, the first thing that you will notice is the dual pane window. You can set up the left and the right panes to different locations and file management will suddenly get much faster and much easier. It even supports tabs and drawers so you can have collections of locations on each pane making the set up of of your source and destination even easier, and faster. The user interface will be familiar to anyone who has spent any amount of time on a Mac. The UI looks very much like finder, with Tabs borrowed from Safari.
What you miss out on however, are the three views that Finder offers, that is, no Coverflow, thumbnails or column view. Even the list view doesn’t have the flippy triangles and instead depends on the path bar at the top for navigation. Forklift also doesn’t have the group info viewer (Cmd+Opt+i) and fails to implement that in its info pane at the bottom.
Destination Anywhere
By “destinations” I’m not just talking about a few directories on your home drive or an external USB drive. Forklift gives you total control and access: FTP, SFTP servers, Amazon S3, iPods, Bluetooth devices and just about anything else you can plug into or airport link with. I noticed that while it does have WebDAV support, they haven’t made it easy for connecting to an iDisk.
I am able to upload files to my FTP server as easily as if I were transferring between two directories. It works as well as any FTP client I have tried. I used to use Cyberduck but now I’ll just stick with Forklift. It even makes transferring files to a jailbroken iPhone a breeze. Having one program that can perform multiple functions is essential to me. Especially on my MacBook Air, where I want to conserve as much space as I can, which brings me to the App delete feature.
OS X’s missing uninstaller
In addition to providing a great file management tool, it also has an application deleter. This is an additional tool in Forklift that hunts down all related files for any application you want to delete, automatically. This helps keep the junk off your drive. I ran it against AppDelete and they both worked about the same. You get a brief overview of what its going to delete, and uncheck any particular files you might want to keep for some reason.
Sorting, finding, chopping
The application gives you many different ways to find and move items from spotlight searches to smart folders to favorites tabs. What ever way you keep your filing system forklift can help you out.
Each pane has its own set of Tabs located right above the Path Navigator. By default, the tab bar is hidden until a New Tab is created (Cmd-T). You can force ForkLift to show the tab bar using Shift-Cmd-T. Just like you do in Safari. You can reorder tabs by dragging, and you can even drag them to the other pane’s tab bar (though not to another window yet).
Sync Browsing is another excellent tool and will be useful for managing large backups. What it does is to link the navigation of the original and copy directory structure. Open your local directory in one pane, say, ~/Documents/Projects/. Open the backup of the Projects folder in the opposite pane and turn on Sync Browsing by clicking the Toolbar icon. From this point on, navigation in one pane will be followed by the other pane, so you can compare folder contents.
Random features of usefulness
Forklift fully supports Growl so my Mac can still tell me when it is done with a file transfer. It also has the spring loaded folders like the Tiger Finder, if you like those, but with the dual pane I find this unnecessary. It also includes features like Favourites, a built in archiving tool, and pretty favourites to keep your locations close (eg., SSH directly to your iPhone’s file system).
Forklift also features a batch renamer, and while it features the a regular spotlight search, it can also filter results by name or kind in a given folder.
Does it replace my Finder?
Over all I find Forklift to be a very capable and suitable finder replacement. The simplified dual pane interface, the previews, and the integration with FTP and other media make this a must have tool. And unlike Path Finder, I found the speed to be just as quick (if not faster) than Finder. You can pick it up at BinaryNights.com for $45 - a tad bit on the higher side, I know. Binary Nights also offers a student license for $25, which is much more affordable. They of course have a full featured trial so you can check it out before buying.
There are more powerful finder replacements out there but if you don’t need the bulk and use an FTP I think you will be hard pressed to beat ForkLift. For me they had me at the dual pane support!
The Forklift Giveaway!
Here we are again with another giveaway. This time round we have two licenses of Forklift for, you guessed it, two lucky winners! Our thanks to Binary Nights for this offer. How do you win? The rules are simple.
- A single entry per person
- Valid email address (only to contact the winner)
- Download the trial and let us know what you think about it in a comment.
- (Optional) Tweet or blog about it, with the words ‘@smokingapples’ and a shorturl back to this page for another entry into the draw.
Winners: Daniel and BA. Thanks for commenting everyone!
Thanks!
