One of my pain points in my recent forays into OS X has been the lack of a reasonable Quake/Guake terminal and the hand holding OS X puts you through when dealing with files. As a Linux user, even though I used Ubuntu, I lived on the commandline. Whether it was pushing to git or ssh-ing a machine, or starting up Eclipse, many tasks went quicker by going to the commandline to do them.
I’ve been used to hitting a quick key combo and getting a terminal. Terminal.app fails in this capacity. Visor gives you these features along with tabbing. It might seem like a small thing to a non-developer but we devs are extra crotchety about our machine setup when we have it the setup the way we want it. You can check out Visor at http://visor.binaryage.com.
Happy with the new addition to my little plot of OS X, I was minding my own business reading OSNews and came across another creation from BinaryAge, TotalFinder. TotalFinder is an evolution of OS X Finder that adds tabbed folders (much like Google Chrome) and you can unhide-hide files with a dropdown menu. That is much easier that the alternative of running
defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES
and then restarting Finder. Re-hiding them requires the same sort of command. That’s too much to remember if you ask me.
Other key features include:
- dual mode or two finder windows shown side-by-side, clutch for moving files between directories, and
- folders on top mode, seriously Apple why isn’t this standard.
I’ve only been playing around with TotalFinder for about half a day but I’m pretty happy with it. It makes OS X feel more like home to me. Now if only someone could write an app to move my window icons to the right where they should be...
TotalFinder licenses are $15 for a single license or $10 each for a 3-pack, totalling $30. More info at totalfinder.binaryage.com
