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 better mousetrap . 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]