Path Finder, Lost and Found

This post was originally going to be about how I had decided to part ways with Path Finder and free up a little extra CPU/RAM for myself. There were some improvements in Finder that I was pretty psyched about, and I figured out workarounds with Quicksilver for a lot of the things I missed most about Path Finder. And then, tonight, a new release from Cocoatech brings me running joyfully back. I absolutely love developers who are as excited to stay on top of new technology as I am :). I’ll share some of my Quicksilver solutions in a second, but first, here’s what’s new in Path Finder…

Quick Look. After you get over that tingly feeling you got from seeing the beautiful Cover Flow holding your latest PDFs instead of your album covers, you start to realize that yes, she’s pretty, but she’s not that bright. When it comes down to it, for me, a thumbnail grid is still a preferable way to scan for images, and there’s no way in hell that I’d want to look for a text file in a folder of such using Cover Flow. That being said, the thing that sticks with you after your first impression wears off, well, that’s called Quick Look. Not having to open Preview to figure out what something is was golden to me. And ever since I learned you can use it from the command line, I’ve figured it can’t be far off from the third-party file managers. And so Path Finder speeds to the rescue. Quick Look combined with an insane amount of instant information in the browser window means never opening preview, never hitting ⌘I, and missing Cover Flow a little less.

System-wide default file browser. It was getting kind of pointless to run Path Finder when everything kept opening Finder windows on me. So they fixed that one right away, too. It’s like they read my mind, sensed my departure and wooed me back. Next time, I’ll check a forum or send an email first, but this works, too.

They’ve also fixed a bunch of Leopard bugs that were driving me insane. I knew those would go away, and they did.

Aside from that, the one thing I learned when I tried to quit Path Finder was that I had become completely dependent on the Drop Stack. If you’re not a PF user, that’s a little drop bucket in the upper corner where you can continually drag files to collect for later operations. You can pull them all off at once in a group, or back off in the order you added them. Might sound strange at first, but once you get used to it, it’s hard to function without.

I learned to replace it with the Quicksilver shelf, which I think could use some work but serves its utilitarian purpose quite well. You have to have the Shelf module installed in Quicksilver to use it. Once the commands are set up with a decent priority, using a shortcut to grab the current selection from finder and “Put on Shelf” allowed me to collect files for any Quicksilver task later, including moving or trashing. In a lot of cases, it’s just as easy to use the comma trick, quickly navigating to a folder and then scrolling through and hitting the comma on each file you want to add. Then you can run a move, trash, email, etc. command on the whole batch. That was going to be my solution. But now I have my stack back. I’m thankful to have finally figured out the shelf, but I sure did miss that stack.

While I was at it I started playing with Quicksilver’s clipboard history. I’ve been flirting with a few different clipboard managers for a while now, my long running favorite being iClip, but only because it’s been the most stable and flexible. I’ve long been looking for something visually simpler and easier to integrate. That’s one thing I’m definitely keeping. If you’ve never used it, you’ll need to make sure you have the Clipboard module installed under Plugins, and then enabled in the preferences. Then open up Quicksilver and press ⌘L. It will start tracking your clipboard history and you can click items or press their numbers to paste them into your current document. It works with files, too. And there’s a storage clipboard for snippets that you can add by dragging to it. So that I’ll keep. The rest, I’m very relieved to be back to Path Finder.

I’ve actually got a whole lot more to share about Quicksilver, but I’ll save that for another post. I’m working hard on a revamped MoodBlast, playing with Safari as a web development browser, and figuring out some new GTD solutions. I’ll be looking for input in all of those areas!