Path Finder has long been a super full-featured Finder replacement for OS X, and now it has been updated to version 6. I have been trying Path Finder on and off for years now, but finally gave up as it’s pretty much impossible to kill the native Finder completely.
Add to this the fact that the Finder doesn’t suck nearly so much as it used to, and that I find most of what I want with Launchbar and Spotlight these days and I’d all but given up on Cocoatech’s offering. But as v6 adds support for file tagging and batch renaming which – in addition to it’s already impressive line-up of features – might make it worth another look.
The first thing that’ll hit you is that Path Finder is fast. Way faster than the Finder on my iMac. Image previews are instant, movies don’t lock it up for tens of seconds like they do the Finder, and regular navigation is quick, too.
But it’s the features you’re interested in, right? Path Finder already has built in text-editors, image editors, terminal windows, tabbed browsing (did you hear that, Apple? Tabbed. Browsing), a drop stack and a dual-pane browser. V6 adds a file transfer queue, file tagging (using the Open Meta standard), and batch renaming (thank you God), along with geekier additions like a hex editor (for all your software-cracking needs) and an ACL editor (if you don’t know what this is, then you shouldn’t really care).
There’s a lot more (completely customizable menus and contextual menus, very powerful search, right-click to drill down into a folder without opening it), but you can just get along by using this as a simple Finder replacement if you like. But that might be to miss the point – Path Finder is built for wrangling files and folders, and it does a great job. I’m going to stick around for the month-long trial just to try out the batch renaming and the speedy interface. Who knows – maybe I’ll keep it this time?
Path Finder costs $40.
