Forklift

I’ll be the first to admit that I find the Finder to be tedious for certain tasks; for me at least, a multi-window interface is just not the most obvious paradigm by which to deal with a filesystem.

For example, a common use case is to move something from a location buried at a ridiculously deep layer in the filesystem to an unrelated and equally ridiculously deep layer. I’m certain that there are people who are completely facile with this activity in the Finder; I’m unfortunately not one of them.

Back in the days when 8088 machines with 8MHz ‘Turbo’ switches roamed the earth, we used Norton Commander, a file manager with a dual-pane interface. For my money, this interface hasn’t been bettered yet for filesystem manipulation; it’s the simplest and easiest interface for the task.

I’d tried a few of the the Norton Commander clones on Windows, but none of them held the magic for me. I was therefore intrigued to discover Forklift, a dual-pane file manager for OS X.

The tiny screenshot size available here on Blogger doesn’t really do Forklift justice; I strongly recommend visiting the site to see higher-resolution images.

Forklift is quite full-featured; I use the following features constantly:

• dual-pane interface, with tabs
• integrated archive (zip, tar, rar, etc.) support
• application deleter
• integrated FTP/SFTP support
• live preview inspector panel, with, for example, audio playback available directly in the inspector

There are numerous other features available; these are just the ones that I’m making constant use of. This utility reminds me of the iPhone announcement….

“We’re releasing a file manager, an archive utility, an application deleter, an FTP client, a preview utility, an Amazon S3 client….do you get it? It’s a file manager, an archive utility….”

Cue applause. In short, you can obtain all the functionality provided by Forklift, but with Forklift you get it all in one spot, with a beautiful Cocoa interface.

Forklift is relatively new to the market, but was rock solid during the lengthy public beta period. It’s been completely reliable for me.

A 15-day unlimited trial is available; registration cost is $29.95.