Binarynights
In ForkLift 4 beta 4, we have completely redesigned the Info Window as a standalone window and as part of the Preview Pane. The changes in the permissions have to be applied to take effect. As a new feature, it is also possible to calculate the folder size inside the Info Window.
Another big new feature is the Theme Editor. We accidentally left the in-house theme editor in the previous beta version. The user demand for a real theme editor was so high, that we decided to make an easy-to-use theme editor that you can now use to create your own themes.
We have also added the highly requested Warp app as a Terminal app.
We made some changes to the copy engine, copy operations should be faster too.
There are numerous other new features, improvements and fixes in this version.
Check out beta 4 and let us know what you think of it. Please only report new bugs and issues that we listed as fixed but are still available in ForkLift 4 beta 4.
New
- Option to create and save your own themes – Themes can be created and edited under ForkLift > Settings > Themes
- “New Favorite” and “New Favorite Group” menu items added to the Favorites menu
- Tooltips of the Toolbar buttons
- Tooltips of the icons in the Preview Pane
- Type Select inside the Favorite Manager
- “Close Other Tabs” context menu item of tabs
- Default Folder X integration to detect ForkLift window
- Completely redesigned Info Window
- “Apply” button in the Info Window to apply changes in the Permissions
- Option to calculate folder size in the Info Window
- The “Esc” button is not hard coded to open Quick Open. Quick Open has no default keyboard shortcut, the desired shortcut can be added in the Settings of ForkLift
- Same keyboard shortcut as in Finder (Command-Shift-.) to show and hide invisible items
- Warp as a new Terminal application that can be selected in the Settings
Improvements
- SSH config handles case sensitivity and comments
- Deleting favorite groups from the sidebar is possible
- New, more visible Edit button in the toolbar
- Context menu item “Duplicate” added to favorites in the Favorite Manager
- It is possible to expand and collapse favorite groups with the arrow keys in the Favorite Manager
- Sound effects after the completion of file operations
- Enhances the presentation of the items in the Activities section inside the Preview pane to display more data
- Improved Apple Script implementation
- Command-Click to open a favorite in a new tab
- Option-Click to open favorite in the inactive pane
- The Date columns can be made narrower and the short form of the Date doesn’t contain the “Time”
- Enhanced, faster copying
- When the selected theme doesn’t exist any longer, the theme defaults to the system theme
- Date added gets updated immediately, which fixes numerous issues caused by the missing date
Fixes
- Fixes an issue where after a failed move operation the source file could be deleted
- Fixes an issue where no warning was shown when deleting a favorite from the sidebar
- Fixes an issue with the displayed path in the path bar when “Show in Enclosing Folder” was selected during a search
- Fixes an issue where ForkLift couldn’t get the bucket region on Digital Ocean Spaces
- Fixes an issue which made the text in the sidebar smaller
- Fixes an issue where it wasn’t possible to add a favorite in the Favorite Manager
- Fixes an issue where the favorite moved to the last position within its favorite group after it had been edited
- Fixes an issue where the size of the Preview Pane wasn’t restored correctly after a restart
- Fixes a possible FTP TLS data loss issue
- Fixes an issue with the alternating backgrounds when switching between the system appearance themes
- Fixes an issue where the window title wasn’t refreshing
- Fixes an issue where “$SOURCE_SELECTION_PATHS” didn’t handle names with spaces in them correctly
- Fixes an issue with “Calculate Folder Size”
- Fixes an issue where the shortcut “Command-Shift-E” to eject a drive didn’t work
- Fixes an issue where all shares with the same name on different machines got highlighted in the sidebar
- Fixes a display issue of the About ForkLift window when the System theme was dark but the ForkLift theme was light
- Fixes an issue where file selection got lost when the files were grouped
- Fixes an issue where ForkLift displayed an error message when it couldn’t reopen a folder that was deleted in the meantime, the starting directory opens instead
- Fixes an issue where the text in the Go to Folder pop-up remained white the theme in ForkLift was light but the theme of the OS was dark
- Numerous minor fixes and improvements
Agnes, nice progress with this beta. Control-click on trackpad is not enabled as right-click in the sidebar and in the favorite manager in this version either so please fix.
Unfortunately, this is an issue with Swift UI, control-click should work automatically as a secondary click, but it doesn’t. We will investigate if we can work around this bug somehow.
Thanks for the update Agnes.
Not any word/step for the BIGEST missing Feature: keyboard selection of items!
Where’s the problem to bring back the MAIN Functionality of a split-view file explorer like its work in FL3?
We are really sorry, but as we stated before, we don’t plan to add keyboard selection to ForkLift 4.
Well, in previous beta comments you answered to me that it’s in your feature request list. Without that, FL4 is dead to me.
C/p of your post:
agnesbinarysays:
May 8, 2023 at 6:51 pm
We have already added that to the feature request list.
Yes, that really kills ForkLift for me as well
Sorry, if that was misleading. Adding something to the feature request list means that somebody has requested a feature and not that we will add that feature to ForkLift. We add the individual requests to keep track of different features that users would like to see in ForkLift and to see how high the demand for those features is. We don’t want to add keyboard selection to ForkLift 4. We will see if the demand will be so high that we will have to change our minds.
I cannot reply to you latest message for some reason.. Anyway, may I ask why you don’t want to add keyboard selection to ForkLift 4?!
And how you are measuring demand? Checking messages here? Or you have some kind of feature request list where users can vote feature up?
Did users request to remove keyboard selection or you just decided by your own?
Btw, keyboard selection is partly there. Holding shift and moving pressing cursors up/down will select items above/below the current one.
@Z We know that this feature was useful to some users but the developer of ForkLift has made the difficult decision to remove this feature mainly because of the way how it should be integrated into the macOS environment. We keep track of feature requests sent to us here, on twitter and emails and it is not possible to vote them up or down.
Thanks for the answer! Could you please elaborate: “remove this feature mainly because of the way how it should be integrated into the macOS environment”?
If you mean how it’s in Finder and how macOS users are used to, then what’s the point of ForkLift?! Only to have a split-view? Then remove split-view too, it’s just confusing macOS users 🙂
Of course, you can do whatever you want with your product but you should differentiate yourself from Finder or similar file managers.
Thanks for a new update! One issue I noticed right away was that, once I click on my downloads folder, it takes between 0,7 and 1,2 seconds to open. This folder has quite a large number of files (around 1500). However the issue was not there in the previous beta or in Forklift 3 (just tested). It seems to go away if I remove the columns in view options (I had size and date added). I added two more columns (kind and date modified) and the issue is worse.
Thank you for reporting this. We don’t see this problem at the moment, but we will investigate it on a slower machine. Which macOS do you use?
Hi, I’m on Ventura 13.4, M1 MacBook Pro (32 GB). Just been testing it once more, now it was close to 3 seconds before the folder opened, even when going back and forth between another folder and the downloads folder. Still, when I try in Forklift 3, nearly instant.
Thank you for the info, we will investigate this.
“Fixes an issue where “$SOURCE_SELECTION_PATHS” didn’t handle names with spaces in them correctly”
Not so…
Sorry for that. We will take a look at that.
Does your command contain the quotation marks, like this: “$SOURCE_SELECTION_PATHS” or does it contain only $SOURCE_SELECTION_PATHS? If it doesn’t contain the quotation marks, then please add those.
Yes, this works.
Another use case: use search bar to narrow list of files that match a pattern. Press ESC to end the search. The search is still open (should go back to file list).
Pressing the “X” does handle this correctly, though ESC should work…
Thank you for reporting this, pressing Esc should close the search the same way as the X. We will try to fix this.
The “Esc” button is not hard coded to open Quick Open.”
Yes, it still is.
Actually in my main window, it isn’t. Other windows still bring up Quick Open with ESC.
What other windows do you mean?
Can you delete it in the Settings?
“What other windows do you mean?” If I have more than one ForkLift window open.
“Can you delete it in the Settings?” It’s not set to ESC in the settings.
Could you please restart ForkLift and make sure that you only have the latest ForkLift version open? Check if you still see this behavior. Esc shouldn’t work in any windows to open Quick Open if that doesn’t work in the “main” window. If that still happens, then please send us a screen recording of this recording your entire screen or the entire ForkLift window.
I am using a Japanese environment with 2-byte characters.
I would like to report on the “Resize columns to fit” in the columns view.
The widths are now adjusted more accurately than in beta3, but there are still cases where the widths do not widen properly for long filenames.
In use, the problem seems to occur more often when there are 20 or so 2-byte characters.
Thank you for letting us know.
“Deselect All” within “Quick Select” doesn’t work.
The preview window doesn’t remember the setting “Automatically Resize”.
Thank you for reporting the issue with Quick Select.
What do you mean by Automatically Resize in connection with the preview pane? Please describe what you do and what is happening (and what should be happening).
How does the identity agent support work?
I’m using 1Password to manage my SSH keys and connecting to a server works fine through the Terminal/iTerm2, but on Forklift I get prompted for the server password.
I tried selecting the agent.sock in Forklift but that didn’t work (it asks for the .sock passphrase)
This is my ./ssh/config
“`
Host *
IdentityAgent “full-path-to-the/agent.sock”
“`
Thant should work. We will look into this.
Issue here too with latest forklift 4.0.1, if I use IdentityFile in addition to IdentityAgent as described here https://developer.1password.com/docs/ssh/agent/advanced/#match-key-with-host , I can login correctly in terminal, but in Forklift it asks for the passphrase of the public key I specified.
Same issue for me with broken 1Password use on Forklift 4.0.1 (424). 1Password was fine on v3.
“Command-Double-Click on a folder item to open it in a new tab” doesn’t works.
(However, “Command-Click on a sidebar item to open it in a new tab” works well.)
Thank you.
Thank you for reporting.
Re Preview Window.
What is the expected behavior? On my Mac Studio Display there is a limit to how big I can make the preview window. If I expand it to its maximum and automatically resize and Quit Forklift 4 then reopen;
the preview screen moves back to a smaller/default position
the tick on automatically resize has been removed
There is no setting to automatically resize the Preview Pane, you must have changed some other setting (column view settings maybe?). But you are right, if you expand the Preview Pane to its maximal size, then it reopens slightly narrower. That will change in the next update.
I’m getting a “This Beta version is expired” message. I’ve got Beta 4 installed.
All beta versions prior to beta 4 have expired. Beta 4 should work without issues. Please delete that beta version and download beta 4 again from this page. You most likely have a previous version.
Hi,
i try to run a Shortcuts.app Shortcut from the services menue within Forklift. This fails with some generic notification saying that there was a problem and the shortcut could not be run. This is also the case in Forklift3.
Triggering it from other applications works fine.
I am using beta 4, as well as Forklift 3.5.8 on Ventura 13.4 with the lates patches.
Would be great if you could have a look into it.
Please contact us in an email and provide more detail on this issue. Please show us what kind if shortcut you are using. support [at] binarynights [dot] com
Dear Team
I watched the beta 4 of the forklift. What amazes me right away is that the keyboard controls have changed. The functionality that was standard in the Forklift 3 has changed. The main key “space” is now assigned with info and there is no way to change this setting. Since then, our devs have only used “Total Commander for Windows” and for the MacOS Forklift. It would be desirable if you change the basic function, prioritize it in the backlog, which ultimately defines a file manager –> see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_manager#:~:text=keyboard%20is%20the%20primary
Kindly, Herold
Unfortunately, we have removed the keyboard selection from ForkLift 4. It is not possible to select items with the Space bar.
C/p from ForkLift 3 feature list 🙂
Keyboard Control
Control every operation straight from the keyboard, including selecting files by pressing the spacebar.
How the heck you deiced to remove something you list as a key feature?!
Thanks Herold for requesting the same feature to come back what some of us requesting since the first beta. Hopefully, ForkLift will listen. If not, someone else will and make another file manager. Anyone knows MacOS file manager like Total Commander?
CRAX. Keyboard orientated.
Thx Herold for your post. I can’t understand it too why the most/MAIN Function is gone in FL4. The development goes here in the wrong way. They address only the younger peoples. These generation they could’t operate a Computer without using a mouse/trackpad! I’m still hoping and keep the fingers crossed that FL4 change the mindset itself to bring back a split-file manager for professionals and not only for beginners/dummys….
Since my latest post I’m searching for alternative… I found a few. Commander One is good but missing Quick Select/Search. Otherwise, it’s closest to Total Commander I found so far. Besides good old FL3, of course. Space is used to select by default, F3 to preview… But I’m missing quick select a lot!
While I’m talking about Quick select. In FL3, cmd+s, start typing and when file or folder shows app, double click would lead to that file/folder. In FL4 double click does nothing. Enter will lead to the file/folder. Keyboard select is removed but quick select requires keyboard usage. Very confusing and inconsistent.
Thank you for reporting the issue.
You are very welcome 🙂
A suggestion for filtering the file list:
It would be already, if there is a setting, with which one can determine whether with pressing a letter or number key the next file with the initial letter is selected (as now) or automatically into the search window is jumped and the entire file list (if necessary after further keys) is filtered.
With kind regards
Sorry for my English. My language is German.
(Translated with http://www.DeepL.com/Translator)
You can start typing into the ForkLift pane and it will jump to the first match. You can also jump into the search field with the Command-F keyboard shortcut. If you don’t search in the Subfolders, then ForkLift filters the items. Filtering is very quick, so simply enter a part of the filename into the search field and make sure that you search for name without searching in the subfolders.
Thank you.
I want to avoid the “detour” via Command-F and start directly with the filtering of the file list, because I need this function very often.
If you can turn such a function on and off via the settings, everyone can decide whether to use it or not.
With kind regards
Sorry for my English. My language is German.
(Translated with http://www.DeepL.com/Translator)
Making “Quick Filters” available in ForkLift is already on our feature request list. We haven’t decided if we will enable that option but we will consider that.
Is there a way to toggle off the live edit in preview? Or add syntax coloring to the preview editor?
We might add syntax coloring in the future but that is not on our to-do list at the moment. What do you mean by toggling the live edit in the preview exactly? You want to switch between the editable content and the normal preview of the file?
I’ve been using this for a while, and I am overall impressed by stability and overall positive overhaul of the interface making it more consistent with modern macOS look. But obviously I was mostly interested in the new features, hence support for Compare and SCM are excellent additions!
Bugs
1. Column sizes are not properly restored after app restart.
2. Copying layout from left pane to right pane is no longer supported (no View -> Save Defaults and Restore). Not sure if I understand Save Defaults button in View settings if there’s no way to restore it? (regression to FL3)
3. Item lists are less condensed than both in Finder and FL3, so we see less items. Please at least provide an option to adjust line spacing.
4. Getting into .zip and then out does not retain the focus on the zip file, hence Archives do not behave as folders completely (regression to FL3)
5. When opening archives as folder, we don’t see full path anymore (regression to FL3)
6. No way to bind Activities popup (popup – not side panel) anymore. Please expose this as View -> Quick Activities or similar so it can be bound to the keyboard (regression to FL3)
7. ForkLift AppleScript tab should also provide reveal method for tab class that will NOT open new tab. Currently it is impossible to go to given folder from command line without opening new tab in activePane, so AppleScript does not offer anything that can be already done with open -a ForkLife
8. FL4 is no longer .ssh/config aware so e.g. aliases do not work anymore (regression to FL3)
9. Show Devices should be called Quick Devices or Quick Drives to maintain consistent naming and should be rather in Go menu than View
10. Activity icon is triggered for a second when and get in and out of the folder as if the folder view change is considered as an activity. This is bit jarring or not sure if really needed (regression to FL3)
Suggestions
1. Name columns should resize together with window as in Finder and any other file management application.
Try to resize Finder’s window to see how it works. Please at least make this behavior as an option, so one can simply resize the window when dealing with folder with long names. NOTE: I’ve sent such feedback for previous Forklift releases long time ago but it was never implemented :~(
2. If 2 or 3 files are selected in one pane, Compare feature should compare them instead of greying itself out and being restricted to single file/folder cross-panel comparisons.
3. ForkLift 3 icon should be provided as an alternative using built-in macOS mechanism. Not everyone appreciates major overhaul of the icon every single release.
4. Quick Select is far too simple, it should allow typing wildcards etc.
5. Quick Select and Show Devices blue icons are quite off, why not use same subtle outline as on sidebar?
Kind regards from your loyal user and greetings to Mudi!
Mudi says hi too. He is happy that you still use ForkLift:)
1. Which column sizes do you mean exactly? (column view or list view or the size of the panes, etc)
2. We will add the option to restore the view settings
8. ForkLift 4 looks at the config file but noteverything is supported. Aliases should work though. Please send us a bug report about this issue and include the content of your config file. You can also include a video to show what is happening or what is not happening:)
Suggestions:
3. It is not likely that we will add the option to use the old icon.
4. Quick Select knows regexp: ForkLift uses the macOS standard regex framework.
You can find out more here: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nsregularexpression
5. That will change in the next update
All the other things are already on our to-do list our feature request list
Hi Agnes,
Many thanks for your answers. Here’s my extra feedback.
1. I had a problem with Data Modified on the left pane. After app restart it was something else (shorter) than I set before restart. I had to resize it few times, and at some point finally FL4 started to remember the width.
2. Perfect, thanks!
3. Well, replacing app icon is still relatively simple these days with Finder, but not necessarily well known to macOS users. Nevertheless TBH I don’t understand why you put such emphasis on providing customization of UI colors in new FL4, but you absolutely don’t care about providing tiny flexibility on main Icon level. Please check the excellent Parcel app and how this modern macOS feature can be implemented.
4. It is not very intuitional that one can enter RegEx there at all. Also it would be more convenient and intuitional to use Bash/Shall wildcard syntax used by almost every other dual pane file manager TC, MC… (at least as an option). RegEx is not very robust if you need to type it many times by hand.
8. Simple config with HashKnownHosts trips FL4 claiming host name is unknown
— cut —
HashKnownHosts no
Host test
HostName 127.0.0.1
— cut —
Also FL4 requires putting username, but SSH does not. Why not pre-fill with current logged username (grey text)? Would be nice we can set usernames in ssh/config.
1. We will look into that
3. At the moment we don’t plan on using more
4. We have added this to our feature request list
8. Please send us an email about this issue because it is hard to follow it here: support [at] binarynights [dot] com
When doing a Connect via WebDavHTTPS in FL4b4 and doing some file transfers, no errors would show but it happened a few times that the transfer wouldn’t stop transmitting a file when it reached its file size transmitted. It wouldn’t move on to the next, it just kept increasing the bytes transferred. You can cancel the transfer and try again and would work but again stop working.
The server I was transferring to was my own. I use Langui.net’s Nav Server (https://langui.net/webdav-server/) and have been using it for many years now without a hitch, so I can’t see it being a problem as it worked flawlessly after installing/using setapps/cloudmounter (https://cloudmounter.net).
Have a look at this as i don’t remember having FL3 having an issue.
Thanks
Could you please send us a screen recording about this issue at support [at] binarynights [dot] com ?
Email Sent!
8. FL4 b4 asks for password and (mandatory a user) when there’s such host, user and IdentityFile key configuration in .ssh/config. Also, does not utilize Port Configuration, making a “General error: Failed sending banner”
Host blabla.eu
ServerAliveInterval 60
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa-blablaeu
Port 7822
We use a new ssh engine, so it is possible that there are issues. But the way how you try to connect should work. If the issue was with the port number, there would be a different error message. If you can give us a test account to the server, then we will test the problem.
First, congrats for the great work on this version 4.
I have a weird behavior when pasting files from RDP session into Forklift.
Files are copied into the target, same size, but they are filled with zeros, making the files unusable.
Doing the same operation in Finder gives me a proper file.
Kind regards
Does that work in ForkLift 3?
Hi Agnes et al.,
I some extra small points not covered by my previous post, I hope you don’t mind:
1. FL4 does support Edit action on folders (regression to FL3). Sublime Text and many other editors are perfectly fine with folder editing/opening. I painfully realized this when I wanted to edit some multi-file configuration folders and it was not possible with single keystroke. Ideally having [x] Use on folders for particular Edit tool would be most flexible solution.
2. Please provide a checkbox to disable new sounds / audio indicators. Ideally something like in iMessage that even provides some mean to use different sound or no sound. Or maybe it is already there but I cannot find it?
3. In the past I could close FL3 options with Esc, not possible with FL4. (minor regression to FL3)
4. Top toolbar could be still made independent UI element as in Finder with slight non-white background, so it is clear which part can be used to drag the window. Are you still considering some different UI approaches there or looking for an feedback on this?
Cheers, Adam
1. Added to our bug tracker
2. That is not possible at the moment, but that is on our to-do list
3. Added to feature request list
4. You can drag the window dragging every part of the toolbar that isn’t an icon or a text, you can drag it by the top part of the sidebar too, so I’m not sure what you mean.
Hi, FL4 looks really nice! But there is one feature I’ve been desperately missing: compare directories – basically the same as sync but FL would just select the files instead of copying them. It could be implemented either as:
1) another button in Sync dialog (I’d choose between Sync or just Select files) – that would be more powerful, or
2) another item in the Edit menu: “Select differences” and it would select files/folder, that are missing in the other Pane.
If you add this feature it would help me A LOT. Thanks!
(one example: when I do sync between two directories but I want to copy the missing files to another directory)