multiple sidebars “for whatever reason” — The reason is, well, having different sidebars to better organize your workflow. I have sidebars for coding, publishing, scripting, etc… Simply, all that stuff does not fit in one alone, like in Finder. Here is finder who gets messy.

dual file browser — “the column view is more than enough to drag files around” … Well maybe it’s true to put the pictures of the dog in a pendrive, but this is an incredible feature if you work with many servers.. At a glance you can compare directories, move stuff around, etc…

the typography is “linux like” …. well …. you can customize Path Finder till you die. Not only the typography (under “preferences”, hard huh?), but set antialias, shadow text, apply textures, transparency, change colors ….. Finder does not allow ANYTHING.

“icons are roughly cut” … You can set the icon size as big as you want with a slider (btw- that Apple copied for the latest Finder). This has been in Path Finder for years.

About the user interface in second place, I also disagree. I discussed in previous paragraphs some of the Path Finder customization possibilities. But there are tons more, like redefining the labels colors, set 3D appearance, etc…

About the Path Bar, is simply brilliant, as it allows you to jump back and forth around long paths.

In resume, I guess the author just reviewed the program in 5 minutes.

Select the first two preferences, Launch Path Finder automatically after log in’ and ‘Quit Finder automatically at launch’, you could also select the third, ‘Hide Finder’s desktop’ if that’s your inclination.

Path Finder (PF) does have its issues and shortcomings. People’s needs will vary, but one I notice is that your can’t navigate through aliases from folders added to the Bookmarks, meaning that use of these as a means to gain hierarchical access to items is limited. I was hoping this might overcome Finder’s identical limitation in placing folders in the Dock to use as a hierarchical menu to access applications but, no…

Its hard to know without the code, but that this and other features mimc exactly the Finder behaviour makes me wonder if this reflects (re)presenting Apple’s functionality, or if its a limitation of the Frameworks (programming code libraries provided by Apple, for non-programmers). Personally, I’d have like to seem a number of more original features, but then that’s easy since I’m not the one coding them!

I personally think that split (dual) panes reduces, not increases, clutter. To achieve the equivalent with full windows takes more screen space and involves a certain amount of fiddling with sizes and positions to get them side-by-side. It might add to the complexity within the (Path) Finder, but not the overall complexity.

One minor quirk of searching in PF on sizes is that you can’t search for “equals” a particular size (approximately a particular size, plus/minus some value would also have been useful), you have to do-it-yourself in two steps. (This may reflect internally searching at the level of numbers of bytes, rather than KBytes, but really it wouldn’t have been hard to program around this.) Personally I would like to have seen a “power users” option to use regular expressions, but then I suppose I could use Terminal…

Secure delete isn’t unique to Path Finder, its been in Finder for quite a while.