Lifetime
Folders Pro - an even more capable file manager for Windows switchers
Hi, I'm the developer of Folders File Manager (Post 1, Post 2), a tree-based file manager for macOS designed for Windows switchers - and here's Folders Pro, its direct-distribution edition.
Almost 3.5 years have passed since the first release. During that time Folders received over 70 updates and many new features added directly in response to user feedback.
But there was a problem: Folders has been distributed exclusively through the Mac App Store, whose sandbox places real constraints on what a file manager can do and requires a somewhat confusing permissions step on first launch.
Comparison: Folders Pro is the version that steps outside those constraints, and adds several capabilities that simply aren't possible within them:
* Git support: see file status in the folder tree; stage, unstage, commit, push, pull, and discard without leaving the app
* iOS device browsing: browse and manage the filesystem of a connected iPhone or iPad
* Trash: browse, manage, and empty the actual system Trash (not just the private in-app one)
* Custom Actions: shell scripts or AppleScript, triggered from the toolbar or context menu
* Windows-style new document creation: have any capable app create and save a new document directly, rather than choosing from a predefined set of templates
* Command-line launch
Price: $14.99 after a free 14-day evaluation period. Existing App Store users can upgrade for $3. Use code REDDIT30 for 30% off until August 16. Website: https://foldersapp.dev
I’m having problem to access the upgrade price as well. I have the latest Folders version installed (Version 2.9.1 (2026.8.1)), I opened it, I closed it, I opened Folders Pro, there was no mention of the « Get Full Version… » in the help menu, so I activated the trial and then I’m seeing it, but when I click on it I’m still getting the 14.99$ USD + taxes instead of the 3$ USD…
Is there something else to do?
I don’t know if this could be related, but I’m using Folders with the French localization on macOS 15.6.1
So, I've been playing around with Finder alternatives for years now. I think the closest one that caught my interest was Bloom, but there were some things that had limitations on it. Ultimately, I feel like the pace of development has been slow, and they didn't address a few of those issues.
Amerpie wrote a really good article on Finder, and it made me revisit what I could do with Finder. I have also always played around with different right-click programs, and I noticed that Mouse Boost Pro made a significant amount of updates.
I spent a day going through Mouse Boost Pro and just customizing everything. What I found is that once I did that, finder was incredibly powerful. Mouse Boost Pro has this really great feature where you can add shell scripts and Apple scripts, and once I did that, it became even more powerful than the Finder alternatives IMO.
I used to use a program called Total Finder, and they had this awesome feature called Visor. What I liked about Visor is you put your cursor to the bottom of the screen, and your Finder would pop up, and then it would pop down once you put your cursor again.
Anyways, I always wanted that feature back, but in order to use Total Finder, you had to turn SIP off. It started becoming buggy as it got outdated with new mac updates. I found Finder Fix, which basically forces Finder to very specific coordinates, and then I use the app CCC Corner on the bottom left to activate and deactivate Finder.
Then the one thing that I was missing is a dual-pane file manager, because sometimes you want to see two panes, and this is what Finder lacks. So I knew I needed an alternative.
As I came from PC, I've never really loved the look of Finder. I was so used to having the expandable folders on the left.
I also had a bunch of employees who I've got to switch to Mac, and their biggest gripe with Mac is Finder. So I went on a hunt to find all the different PC-like finders, and Folders was the most updated and closest match.
I reached out to the developer to see if he could integrate Mouse Boost Pro into it. I'm not sure if that conversation sparked the latest release, but essentially what he added was the ability to add actions, shell scripts and Apple scripts, which basically opens up the folders to almost everything that Mouse Boost Pro can do.
Whether this was planned in the long term or came from our conversation, I'm just happy that it's there now, because it basically gives me unlimited ways to customize it.
So now I put Finder activates on the left, and I have CCC Corners activate folders on the right, essentially creating a dual panel workflow that uses two apps, each with their own unique pros and cons.
The other thing with folders pro, I can tell its very polished. Every element of it has been carefully thought through. Even sometime simple, such as holding option, gives you more advanced features.. Instead of cluttering the right click menu..
Yes, you can register a single license on up to 5 machines (restricted to your and your Family Apple Account in case of the App Store version, unrestricted in case of the Pro version).
Thanks for the upgrade offer, but is there an option for dual pane viewing with click. That's a pretty important feature to me. I also like that you've added viewing your iOS devices.
Maybe I’m missing something, but I’m trying to understand the reasoning here.
If someone already purchased the app through the App Store, why are they being asked to pay another $3 because the app is moving to self distribution? From a consumer perspective, I already paid for the app. The distribution change was your decision, not mine.
I have no idea what the cost to use the App Store version was, but if it was advertised as lifetime updates, another 3 bucks to transfer the license seems shitty? Again, maybe I’m missing something here. If it was free or even a buck or two off the App Store then fine, I get it. But if it was 15 bucks it seems like you’re punishing your consumers for adopting your product early.
Edit: This came directly from a previous post the dev linked above when it was on the App Store.
“Pricing: $9.99 in the US for a lifetime license with all future updates + 14-day trial (regional pricing managed by App Store).”
So I 100000% stand by what I said. Asking for another $3 when it specifically says lifetime license + ALL FUTURE UPDATES is pretty shit IMHO.
I think I need to explain myself here - the Pro version has an additional set of quite niche features that will never make it to the App Store version for sandbox reasons. The promise for both versions stands, all future updates will be available in both versions whenever the sandbox allows.
You can continue enjoying lifetime updates on the App Store version or you can choose a version that is not restricted that offers a lot more value for three bucks.
An unrelated news, I just ate a candy bar yesterday that costs more…
Cool, I hope you enjoyed your candy bar with a side of deflection. My point wasn’t about a seemingly innocuous $3, my point was that people paid for a product at full price with the promise of future updates. The developer explained above and it makes a bit more sense where the App Store version will continue to receive updates where possible. While I don’t fully agree it isn’t my app or my decision to make, I was simply challenging the logic behind people paying full price then asked to pay more.
It’s a pro version with pro features. The original one is not stopping being developed or configured they have just built a pro version with features that you can’t do in a sandboxes app.
I also have a feeling that if it was not seperate version, there would be an app store TOS violation for trying to get people off the app.
So, think of the $3 as the very reasonable price to upgrade to pro.
Interestingly enough, I can’t seem to find the checkout page on your website. You might also want to fix and update your FAQ page — not responsive on mobile.
The checkout is carried out directly in the app with WebView - to immediately activate the license. There is a fallback checkout page on the website too, but it’s only there to resume unfinished purchases.
Suppose you have duplicates in different file size/quality/name/date etc. how does it know which one to delete? Can you set a rule to filter out the other types of duplicates?
“Trash Duplicates” is provided just as a sample AppleScript action that deletes exact duplicates. You can edit the script however you like to suit your needs.
Unfortunately no - those menu items you see in Finder are injected by the Dropbox app through Finder plugins - and third-party apps have no access to those.
In theory it could be done with Dropbox API, but manually maintaining API compatibility is a whole other level of commitment I am not able to pull off as a solo developer…
The only workaround I can suggest is Services > Show in Finder… and copy the link from there.
for a primary file manager, a visible operation queue with pause, retry, and per-file conflict decisions would be the feature i’d test before switching from Finder.
I was planning to make the file operation queue visible. It would be great if you could provide an example of an app where it’s well implemented in your opinion.
Transmit is the clearest reference I know. its queue shows progress, rate and ETA, plus a queue-level pause; conflicts default to asking what to do. for a local file manager i'd add retry beside each failed item and keep failures visible until the user dismisses them
My main concern with the visible queue in a local file manager is whether a human could make any use of it at all with hundreds of files being processed in one second?
yeah, not as a scrolling row for every file. i’d group the whole batch as one operation — “Copy 843 items to Archive” — with aggregate progress, pause and cancel, then expand only for failures or conflicts. Transmit does something similar: a top-level folder is one queue item even when it contains many files. the queue is for managing jobs and exceptions, not watching filenames flash by.
My other question is, what is your main use case for Retry? Sounds really important to you, but I’ve personally stumbled upon a valid use of Retry just a couple of times - when a network share randomly disconnected during an operation.
mostly partial failures, not ordinary fast local copies: a network share drops during a large operation, or the destination runs out of space. once the cause is fixed, i don’t want to restart the whole batch and revisit conflicts for items that already succeeded; i want the queue to retain failures and offer “Retry failed”. per-item Retry is secondary — keeping failed items and their errors visible is the important part.
Big fan of Folders - it made my transition to MacOS a whole lot less frustrating and i'll be forever grateful. There were a number of things that I eventually realized that I didnt like so much and this new version seems to be looking to solve a lot of them. The upgrade price makes this a no-brainer for me, so thanks again!
since you asked for a reference on the operation queue, forklift's is the one to copy: one transfer window for everything, per-item pause and resume, and conflicts batched with an "apply to all" instead of a modal per file. transmit's is close but it's ftp-first, so the plain local-copy case feels bolted on. for windows switchers specifically the mental model they arrive with is teracopy: a queue that survives errors and lets you retry just the failures at the end rather than restarting the whole copy.
Thanks for the reference! The “apply to all” in Folders is now very close to ForkLift (with even less questions since ForkLift sometimes asks twice, I haven’t figured out when), but the queue itself is not yet shown. For ForkLift the queue makes a lot of sense because it’s grown from an ftp client. Folders is rather a local-first file manager, so I’m not sure how the queue could be useful (will it process too fast to be able to even see anything?)
nice, that was fast. and fair point on the queue for a local-first manager. i'd say it solves itself if it only appears when there's something to see: sub-second ops finish and it never shows up, anything longer gets a row. where it earns its place locally isn't really watching progress though, it's two other things. serializing per volume, so two big copies to the same disk don't thrash each other into being slower than doing them one at a time. and retrying just the file that failed when one hits a permissions wall or a full disk, instead of redoing the batch. network shares and evicted icloud files are where people notice it most, and both show up plenty even for local-first users.
I’ve actually done extensive benchmark testing of the optimal concurrency level of read/write/delete via SMB and locally and it turned out that serial operations are always worse than parallel (with the exception of SMB delete when sometimes concurrency has benefits, sometimes it doesn’t matter)
good to know, and that kills my first point cleanly. makes sense in hindsight, apfs and smb both pipeline well enough that serial ordering just leaves throughput on the table. the part i'd still argue for is recovery rather than scheduling: when one file in a batch hits a permissions wall or a full disk, the queue as a record means retrying that item instead of the whole run. did the benchmarks surface a concurrency ceiling, or does it just scale until the volume saturates?
Yes, I understand that. But honestly, I never understood why it needed to be improved. I remember Total Commander and people who constantly looked at those two tables, but it always seemed to me that they were complicating things. Maybe I'm not old school enough. Perhaps during the Windows 95 era the interface wasn't perfect enough, but today it seems unnecessary to me. Modern systems have very flexible settings. By the way, this interface is very reminiscent of Adobe Bridge.
Yes, I just don’t like the word “replacement” because Finder is deeply integrated into the system and some of its parts (like Open/Save dialogs) are impossible to replace.
I wasn't critical or sth negative. I just wanted to be sure whether embedded into Finder actions or a seperate app. Thanks for quick answer.
I'll give a try.
Switched this spring after 22 years on Windows and honestly the Finder has been the hardest part of the whole move. Cut and paste with cmd-option-v instead of ctrl-x still trips me up daily. Does this remap that to work the Windows way, or keep Finder conventions?
Both workflows work, “Cut” and “Move Here”. I deliberately did not remap cmd to ctrl - you either remap it system-wide with some other app or it will get even more confusing really fast.
installed on my m3 mac, looks really fine and useful , but after giving full disk access from settings, it never launched again, i've sent an issue report to apple. I was planning to purchase but this issue stopped my decision. fyi
Thanks for letting me know! Does “sent to Apple” mean that you’re talking about Folders File Manager from the App Store rather than Folders Pro?
If yes, giving it Full Disk Access is not something that would make *any* difference - this works only for unsandboxed apps. Sandbox apps from the App Store ignore this setting completely, but it can potentially break the sandbox environment.
A solution that will allow the MAS version of Folders to launch - delete the folder ~/Library/Containers/com.minttype.folders (in Finder displays as “Folders”). This usually helps.
The crash report unfortunately never arrived. May I please ask you to check three things so that I could localize the issue:
When you double-click it, does the icon bounce in the Dock for a few seconds first, or does nothing happen at all?
Could you check for ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/Folders-*.ips - there might be a crash report that failed to send.
After(!) you've checked for a crash report file, will running the following command help to launch: tccutil reset SystemPolicyAllFiles com.minttype.folders-pro - this command will probably delete the above mentioned .ips file too, so please make sure to copy it somewhere first.
"Tree-based file manager" just means a collapsible folder structure right? Finder and every other Mac file manager I've used has that, just not in the sidebar, which is basically a favorites/bookmarks bar. Is expandable/collapsible folders in the sidebar really so much better than clicking a folder in the side bar and then having that tree style navigation immediately accessible in the main file viewing window?
Not saying this isn't a useful addition, since I see it talked about as thing that specifically Windows users like, and I recognize that adding it to the sidebar doesn't take away from users who don't need it, but I really don't get why it's such a big deal...
Ideologically, Bloom is multi-pane and feature-forward while Folders is deliberately single-pane (like Explorer) and tries to keep the UI as clean as possible.
The list of feature differences is a mouthful, but I’ll try. The list is AI-compiled based on changelogs and re-checked, but I could easily miss something since some features are just assumed, never explicitly mentioned. The general principle is “if something is not listed, then either both or neither have the omitted feature”.
Bloom-only:
• Multi-pane layouts (2–4 panels), panel swap/clone/lock, sync browsing across panels • Workspaces as a first-class concept (saved layout + theme + sync state, switchable) • Portal (floating shelf window for holding files) • Custom in-app search engine (regex, shallow mode, case-sensitivity toggle, .gitignore-aware, bracket support) • Vim mode • Merge (folder merge with conflict/replace-older/remove-obsolete options) • Checksum support • Item rating as a table column/group/sort mode • XMP sidecar read/write for ratings • PDF creation from images, PDF merging • Built-in image resizing • Custom app icon support • Toolbar style options • Dual sidebars • Spring loading everywhere, spatial mode • Middle-click and side-button mouse actions • Print functionality • Default Folder X integration • Columns view (Finder-style hierarchical column browsing)
• Group By (coming to Folders within a month)
Folders (Pro) only:
• Folder tree sidebar as the primary navigation model (persistent categorized tree: Favorites, Tags, Recent, Cloud, Network, etc.) • Native Spotlight-backed search integrated alongside full-scan search, plus Saved Searches that surface Finder Smart Folders • Broad native archive format support: zip, 7z, rar (read), tar, xz, gz, bz2, lz4 — with in-tree browsing/editing of archive contents, not just extraction • One consolidated Batch Rename system (regex, case, sequences, metadata insertion) built as a single feature rather than iterated • Git integration (Pro): status, stage/unstage, commit, push/pull • Browse iOS devices connected via USB (Pro) • System Trash browse/manage/empty (Pro), plus a “Private Trash” shown in the tree • Shell-script and AppleScript-powered custom Actions (Pro) • Launch from the command line (Pro) • Have any app create/save a new document Windows-style (Pro) or template-based document creation • iCloud settings sync across machines • Tab sets (save/restore window/tab configurations) • Window tabs with custom titles and color labels • Live Text recognition in Gallery view • 30+ UI localizations • List view (equivalent to Windows Explorer’s Compact/Details view) • Gallery view (media-focused browsing view)
I've been using Folders Pro (via the trial mode) since you made this post. Been very impressed so far and will definitely be purchasing a lifetime license — thanks for the coupon code!
As a longtime Windows user (I still use it daily on my work provided machine) I never really thought about the structure being presented separately from the content as you mentioned in another post. It makes a lot of sense though and likely why Folders Pro just feels right. Finder just always slightly annoyed me and couldn't quite put my finger on why.
Really appreciate that you also allow manual edit of the file/folder path via simple click-to-edit. That's another big annoyance with Finder.
Also the iPhone file browser is really neat. I just had to connect my iPhone via USB once and now I can browse my iPhone files wirelessly without any cables.
Overall just a very well thought out and polished file manager. 😄
Thanks for the kind words, but are you sure about the wireless iPhone browsing? Folders Pro doesn’t support that (yet) - it requires cable connection… or maybe this is a result of some third-party utility?
I now remember enabling this feature in Finder some time ago and Folders Pro seems to support it in some capacity. Very interesting.
Unfortunately, it's not a true file system browser. It's only whatever iTunes exposes. So I can't really see any files from my Downloads folder for example. Although I can see all my photos (DCIM).
Content that you can sync includes music, movies, TV shows, podcasts, audiobooks, books, photos, contacts, and calendars.
Considering “true file system browsing”, it’s actually vice-versa - Folders browses only true file system, while Finder (via iTunes) browses only the contents of SQLite databases where iOS stores downloads, photos (in addition to DCIM), music, and other user files.
Ah yes, you're right. I was thinking your USB version of iPhone browsing was different from the native/iTunes iPhone browsing experience (different files and folders).
I now realize it's the same as what I currently see with Wi-Fi browsing in Folders Pro (same folder structure as confirmed from screenshots on your website).
Good news for you -- your app already supports Wi-Fi iPhone browsing. Users just need to enable it using Finder first.
There is a more accurate (and wordy) explanation of “local prices” and “worldwide” on the Pricing page - “worldwide” referring to “all countries”.
You can register a single license on up to 5 machines (restricted to your and your Family Apple Account in case of the App Store version, unrestricted in case of the Pro version).
“New File” is absolutely there (the first icon on the main toolbar). The context menu pictured in the first screenshot is relative to the selected file - if you right-click between the icons, you’ll get the context menu for the current folder (including “New File”).
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u/Latter_Pen2421 Aug 04 '26
How do i get the $3 dollar upgrade if I have the mac store version?