ForkLift 3

Heavy lifting for your file management

$29.95 Manufacturer Binary Nights, binarynights.com Requirements OS X 10.11.6 or later

Just because something has been around a long time doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good. Case in point: Finder, the venerable Mac file manager which after more than three decades remains a core part of macOS experience, but which hasn’t really changed in its basic operation for most of that time. Although Finder isn’t likely to go away anytime soon, there’s always room for welcome improvement.

ForkLift 3 is a Mac app that serves double duty as a full-featured alternative to Finder, as well as a client for transferring files between local and remote FTP, WebDAV, Amazon S3, or other connections. ForkLift offers many advantages over Finder, not the least of which is the dual-pane interface that makes copying and moving files or folders between two different volumes a breeze. Like Finder, ForkLift also offers single-pane and tabbed window views as well.

To alleviate some of the complexity inherent in third-party file managers, ForkLift 3 introduces Quick Open, a mousefree feature invoked by pressing oe and then typing a few letters of the location or command you’re looking for. Keyboard jockeys will also embrace Quick Select, which intelligently prunes a large list of items by using a shortcut to select, add, or remove searched files and folders from the current selection.

Among our favorite new features are the ability to make quick revisions to text files directly in the right-hand preview pane — no text-editing app required! — and bulkrename files using a variety of prefixes, suffixes, padding, and sequential numbering options. This is a task we’ve traditionally relied on A Better File Rename to conquer, but having this functionality baked into ForkLift means less hopping between apps. Even better, you can save frequently used settings as a preset, which can be added to the sidebar for super-fast drag-and-drop access in the future.

ForkLift is also ready to serve when the app isn’t running courtesy of ForkLift Mini, a menu bar icon from which you can mount saved remote connections as desktop volumes, perform drag-and-drop transfers by opening droplets, and run saved “synclets” to synchronize files between local and remote targets. Finally, ForkLift now sports a slick optional dark mode, and overall feels much snappier than the previous version.

the bottom line. Faster and more versatile than ever, ForkLift 3 is a winning update to the premier Mac file manager and FTP client. J.R. Bookwalter