Path Finder 4

Posted in: Reviews, Software

I’ve talked a little in the past about Path Finder, the Finder replacement I use on Mac OS X - for me, it’s definitely a :scare: better mousetrap :/scare: . I’ve had the opportunity to use pre-release versions of Path Finder 4 during the development and I’m happy to say it’s a worthy successor and definitely something to check out once it’s released.

A few months ago, I switched from Path Finder 3.x back to the Finder because I was seeing performance issues in PF. The tabbed window features in PF 41 is just awesome and performance was a bit better due to the under the hood changes. However, over time performance seemed to slip back to what I was seeing in PF 3 with up to 20-40 seconds beach balls when switching tabs - I even started going back to the Finder at times.

Earlier this week, I sent in some data to the Cocoatech folks and they were able to find the problem - it wasn’t Path Finder directly, it was an incompatibility between Path Finder and SCPlugin. SCPlugin is the contextual menu Finder plugin for Subversion - a tool that I’d actually turned off a while back2.

I wasn’t able to find any information about how to uninstall SCPlugin, but Sportlight did a nice job of locating a bunch of files with ’scplugin’ in the name - I trashed them all and restarted… WOW!

The difference was like night and day - Path Finder is incredibly snappy, even with lots of tabs open and I’m in love with it all over again.

A big “hats off” to the Cocoatech folks for not only creating a superior product, but also for providing great support. If you use Mac OS X, you owe it to yourself to try Path Finder. You can even buy Path Finder 3 now and get a free upgrade to Path Finder 4 when the new version is released.

  1. For the record, I requested this before they announced PF 4 would include them - but I’m sure they were already going there. [back]
  2. I just use the BBEdit integrated tools and the command line for SVN stuff now. [back]

Popularity: 4% [?]

Posted November 5th, 2005 @ 6:18 PM

One Reply

  1. efor adds this Comment:

    sounds kewl can’t wait!

    November 7th, 2005 at 7:42 am

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