Version 6.1.5 of Default Folder X is available, bringing several enhancements and fixing an interesting problem in Adobe applications on Sequoia.
First up, there’s a new “Open With” item in the contextual menu when you Control-click on search results in the Quick Search window. Like the equivalent menu in the Finder, Open With lets you open a file using any app that’s capable of doing so.
Because Default Folder X tracks all of your recently opened files and folders, this is a great help in those moments when you’re looking at a document and think “but I really need to open this in [Other Application]”. Just hit Command-Shift-Space, type part of the file’s name into the Quick Search window, then use the Open With menu to open it in that other app. You can even hit Command-O in Quick Search to bring up the menu without taking your hands off the keyboard.
Default Folder X 6.1.5 also includes a fix for an interesting bug. The color of Default Folder X’s toolbar (dark mode vs. light mode) is determined by the average color it sees in an application’s file dialog when the dialog first appears on-screen. This has worked without fault for a couple of years, but recently started failing in Adobe apps.
After some debugging, I discovered that the file dialogs in Adobe apps “fade in” when they appear – they’re initially semitransparent, then become opaque (so far, this appears to be unique to Adobe apps). Default Folder X captures an image of the dialog when it first appears – when it’s still semitransparent – and the Core Image filter that DFX uses to determine the lightness / darkness of that image returns a darker color because it’s not opaque (which isn’t consistent with Apple’s documentation). That resulted in Default Folder X using its dark-mode UI even though the file dialog was in light mode – which looked pretty weird. That problem has been fixed in this release.
There are several other enhancements and fixes in 6.1.5 that are detailed in the release notes. You can read them and download the update by choosing Check for Update in Default Folder X, or on the What’s New page. As usual, if you’ve purchased a license for version 6, this update is free.
In macOS Sequoia, Apple introduced a new “feature” that periodically pops up a reminder that you’ve given permission to an app to record your screen. When this new annoyance made its debut, there was a justifiable uproar about it. The reminders originally popped up on a daily basis, plus whenever you restarted your Mac. After the internet backlash, Apple backpedaled and reduced the frequency to once a week, then to once per month, and now every 90 days for apps that you use a lot. That’s tolerable, if not ideal.
BUT…
I’ve been getting a growing number of tech support complaints from Default Folder X users, saying that they’re seeing screen recording reminders every time an Open or Save dialog appears. It seems that Sequoia’s reminder system contains a bug or two, resulting in people getting pestered constantly.
As a developer, this is really aggravating because it’s not my bug, yet my customers are having a really terrible experience because of it. And all for a reminder that really shouldn’t be appearing in the first place (IMO).
IF YOU’RE EXPERIENCING THIS…
First, please complain to Apple by submitting a bug about it. You can do so using the Feedback Assistant app that’s already on your system. To open Feedback Assistant, click on this URL:
File the bug under macOS > Security > Privacy and let them know that you’re seeing screen recording reminders every time you use an app you’ve already approved. The more reports they get about this, the more quickly it will get fixed. If they don’t get many reports, they’ll just ignore it.
Now to (hopefully) fix the problem: Assuming you’re running macOS Sequoia 15.3 or higher and have Default Folder X installed in your Applications folder, follow these steps.
Launch the Terminal application (it’s in /Applications/Utilities)
Paste in the following two commands, hitting the Return key on your keyboard after each one. Note that the first command should be all one line, even though it may be wrapped to multiple lines below.
That should do the trick. If it doesn’t, contact me at support@stclairsoft.com for additional help.
NOTE: If you’re running the Setapp version of Default Folder X, you’ll need to use com.stclairsoft.DefaultFolderX5-setapp in place of com.stclairsoft.DefaultFolderX5 in the first command above. If the problem is occurring with some other app, substitute that app’s bundle identifier there instead.
Version 1.9 of Jettison was released today, delivering some significant internal changes as well as improvements that many users will see when using it.
First off, Jettison now asks you to give it permission for Full Disk Access in your system’s privacy controls. This is necessary because macOS will sometimes refuse to let Jettison mount external USB drives unless it has this special permission. It’s still not clear to me why Apple makes this distinction, since Jettison is able to mount other drives without Full Disk Access, but to avoid problems and confusion, Jettison now requests it by default.
Another change is that Jettison no longer shows every volume that’s mounted on your system. On recent versions of macOS, a number of disk images are automatically mounted by the system. Some, known as cryptexes, are encrypted volumes used for augmenting or updating parts of the system itself, while others such as the iOS Simulator are mounted if you use Apple’s Xcode developer tools. Still other disk images are mounted as part of installing macOS updates. Jettison used to show all of these in its “Eject” menu, which could be confusing because they’re not shown by the Finder, so they no longer appear there.
When Jettison can’t eject a drive because there are open files on it, it pops up an error message to tell you so. These messages have been improved to provide more detail, and when you’re manually ejecting a disk you’ll also see “Quit” buttons to quit any offending apps. That will usually let Jettison finish ejecting the drive.
In the past, using Jettison to mount encrypted volumes that were part of the boot volume’s APFS container would generate odd error messages. This was because the system automatically unlocks those volumes when it unlocks the system volume, but Jettison wasn’t aware of that (Jettison has to unlock all other encrypted APFS volumes before mounting them, so it tried to do that with the unlocked volumes and got an error because they weren’t locked). Jettison is now smarter about handling this case. My apologies if you have this somewhat odd configuration on your system and ran into the bug.
The internal revamp also fixed a number of little bugs, as well as changing the behavior of one feature: If you have volumes selected in the “Don’t remount these disks” menu in Jettison > Settings > Options, those disks will automatically be ejected when Jettison launches. The assumption here is that if you don’t want the drives remounted after they’ve been ejected, you basically don’t want them mounted unless you do so manually.
As usual, this update is free if you’ve already bought a Jettison license (thank you!). You can choose “Check for Update” from Jettison’s menu to get the new version, or download it from the What’s New page. Both ways also give you a complete change history.
Quick Search gets new filtering options, which are especially useful if you want to automate things using AppleScript or Default Folder X’s new URL handler. You can restrict searches to the same options available in the Quick Search menu:
For example, searching for “folders:receipts” will yield only folders whose names match “receipts”, rather than all files, folders, and apps. The filter keywords are the same as the menu items:
all:
files:
folders:
apps:
recent:
favorite:
finder:
spotlight:
This can be used in AppleScript like this:
tell application "Default Folder X" to QuickSearch "folders:receipts"
Other additions to version 6.1.4 include an “Apply to All” checkbox when dragging and dropping multiple files or folders onto Default Folder X’s menu bar icon when they already exist in the chosen folder:
and identical behavior when dropping items onto a folder in Default Folder X’s Finder drawer.
There are also several important bug fixes in Default Folder X 6.1.4 that prevent crashes, hangs, and misbehavior. If you’re using Microsoft Word with Microsoft Sharepoint, running the Copy’Em app, or synchronizing DFX’s settings via iCloud, make sure to update immediately. A less harmful bug, in which DFX fails to show label colors in its menus if you have fewer than 8 favorite labels set up in your Finder settings, has also been fixed.
For a full list of changes and download links, go to the Default Folder X What’s New page. Or if you’re already running Default Folder X, select “Check for Update” from DFX’s menu in your menu bar.
Well, I’m a day late but want to share some details on the changes in the new version of Default Folder X that was released yesterday.
First, the Bug Fixes
1. The last release of Default Folder X (6.1.2) used the macOS windowserver SPI to work around a very problematic bug in Apple’s Accessibility API in Sequoia, and that turned out to be a bit touchy. Since the SPI is officially undocumented, I should’ve been even more paranoid than I was when using it. DFX wasn’t checking the size of the argument returned by some notifications, and that caused a crash in rare circumstances.
2. The improved management of Finder labels in DFX 6.1.2 wasn’t always improved. If your Finder settings lacked a list of favorite tags (or the list contained fewer than the standard 7 tags), Default Folder X would unexpectedly quit. This only affected a few people, as you had to have some pretty messed up Finder prefs for it to occur, but resulted in DFX crashing every time you used an Open dialog. My apologies – it’s fixed in version 6.1.3.
3. In Sequoia, the “Do you want to keep this new document?” Save dialogs optionally contain a popup menu for the file’s format. This confused Default Folder X, resulting in it not putting its toolbar up when it should have. That’s been corrected, so DFX will now enhance Save dialogs when apps offer a format popup (TextEdit is the only one I’m aware of at present).
4. In the process of chasing down the problems above, I also cleaned up several other bugs and sped up the construction of Default Folder X’s hierarchical menus.
I’m sorry about all that – version 6.1.2 was a bit substandard.
New Things
I did manage to actually make a couple of useful additions while chasing down bugs:
1. Quick Search can now be invoked using AppleScript or a custom URL. This is primarily useful for folks who want to access it from a keyboard macro app like Keyboard Maestro or using a launcher / shortcut utility like Raycast or Alfred. Look up the details in Default Folder X’s AppleScript dictionary, or use an URL like:
(yes, you can click on that URL if you’re already running Default Folder X 6.1.3).
2. Default Folder X does a better job of tracking recent Microsoft Word documents that are stored on OneDrive. The underlying problem is interesting: Even though your files are stored locally on your Mac, Word internally keeps track of files on OneDrive using a network URL like https://d.docs.live.net/48c889/OneDriveTest.docx. That makes sense, since the “true source” of the document is on OneDrive – the file on your Mac is just a synchronized copy of it. So Default Folder X has to translate that URL into the location of the local file on your Mac in order to use it. It’s been doing that for a while, but there are some interesting twists and turns if it’s actually stored on SharePoint, Microsoft’s corporate version of OneDrive. DFX 6.1.3 now navigates that little SharePoint maze correctly.
Please Update to Default Folder X 6.1.3
So – regardless of whether those two new things matter to you, please grab the Default Folder X 6.1.3 update to get the bug fixes. You can select “Check for Update” from Default Folder X’s menu in your menu bar, or get more details and download it from the Default Folder X What’s New page.
A little over 2 weeks ago, version 6.1.1 of Default Folder X was released with a workaround for a bug in Sequoia. The macOS 15 Accessibility API partially fails under certain circumstances, so I resorted to using a window server SPI to provide some notifications that Default Folder X needs and was no longer getting from the Accessibility subsystem. Turns out that fix wasn’t perfect, and there were still situations where DFX wasn’t notified by the system. This resulted in various weird behaviors: Finder-click would stop working, the filename field in Save dialogs wouldn’t highlight correctly, you couldn’t Tab around in Save dialogs, DFX’s bezel wouldn’t always hide itself when a file dialog went away, and other odd, confused behavior.
After a fair amount of experimentation followed by exhaustive testing, Default Folder X 6.1.2 is ready, and corrects the problems on Sequoia. I strongly recommend that anyone using macOS 15 update to Default Folder X 6.1.2. You’re not going to lose data or anything like that if you keep using an older release, but you’ll run into annoying inconsistencies and bugs that are fixed now.
In more positive news, version 6.1.2 also includes a revamped framework for handling Finder labels. The little color bubbles are back in Default Folder X’s menus and are correct even if you’ve changed them in your Finder settings. And the Information pane shows the correct label despite iCloud doing its best to screw things up.
This release is also proactive about detecting problems caused by BetterMouse, a popular app for tweaking and enhancing your mouse. BetterMouse’s “click-through” feature changes how windows are activated in macOS, and this results in Default Folder X’s toolbar hiding itself as soon as you click on it. Not very helpful if you clicked there to use one of DFX’s menus. If that happens, you’ll see an alert with instructions to turn off click-through. Incidentally, you can also add Default Folder X to BetterMouse’s exception list and then change the click-through setting only for DFX, but that much detail is too much to fit in a tiny little alert window.
A couple of other infrequently-encountered bugs have been fixed in version 6.1.2, too, and the search results in Quick Search are now sorted with more priority on what’s been used most recently.
As always, if you’re already running Default Folder X, just choose “Check for Update” from its menu in your menu bar to see the release notes and install the new version. If you’d rather check out the release notes here and update manually, head to the Default Folder X Release page for all the details.
A free update is available for Default Folder X 6, adding improvements to existing features and fixing a bunch of issues that have come to light since the release of macOS 15 Sequoia.
Feature Enhancements
Quick Search: The Quick Search keyboard shortcut can now be used to both show and hide the Quick Search window – a minor detail that’s actually very convenient. And when you perform a search, the priority of matching sequential characters is now higher than matching capital letters. This makes the ranking of search results more intuitive. Displaying your Quick Search results is also a little gentler on the CPU – it doesn’t madly try to generate all of the preview icons it needs all at once.
Reveal in File Dialogs: You can now reveal items in file dialogs by holding down the Command key while choosing an item from one of Default Folder X’s menus. This is handy, for example, when you want to open a file that’s in the same folder as one of the files in your Recent Files menu. Command-selecting that file will switch the file dialog to the folder that contains it.
Finder Labels: The Label menu in Default Folder X’s Information panel is now customized with your favorite labels as defined in your Finder settings, rather than showing the system’s 7 default colors. It will also correctly show the label assigned to files stored on iCloud, even though iCloud mucks with the Finder attributes and sets the stored label to “gray” for all files saved to or moved to iCloud.
Bug Fixes
Format Menu: Sequoia contains a redesigned Save As dialog that optionally puts the file format near the top of the dialog, just below the filename. This could confuse Default Folder X 6.1 – it would replace the format menu with its customized path menu, rather than replacing the system-supplied path menu like it’s supposed to. Version 6.1.1 no longer gets confused when that redesigned dialog shows up in TextEdit, Bean, Skim or any other app that uses it.
Sequoia Accessibility Bug: A much bigger issue has been a bug in Sequoia that causes part of the system’s Accessibility API to fail when multiple apps are using it. We’ve found that running either uBar or SideBar stops Sequoia from informing Default Folder X when UI elements are destroyed. This results in DFX’s controls in file dialogs failing to update; its Finder Windows menu and Finder-click feature show windows that are no longer there; and various processes within DFX fail unexpectedly. It basically just gets confused – sometimes really confused. Thanks to help from Oliver Tuerk, developer of Sidebar, and code from Åsmund Vikane, developer of Yabai, I’ve put together a workaround that allows Default Folder X to function correctly even when Sequoia doesn’t.
Finder Toolbar Buttons: Sequoia brought a minor change to the Finder’s preference file contents that could result in Default Folder X resetting the positions of its buttons in your Finder toolbar after you’ve manually rearranged them. Sorry about that – I know it’s annoying and maddening for you folks that take the time to make your Mac setup perfect. Anyway, Default Folder X deals with it now – and in the process I was surprised to run into Classic Mac OS style alias records in the Finder prefs. I had to break out a bunch of deprecated Carbon API calls to resolve those aliases
Miscellaneous Other Stuff: There are also fixes for Default Folder X’s drawer not working correctly in certain Stage Manager configurations and a few graphical glitches.
More Info
As usual, there are release notes and download links on the What’s New page. Or if you’re running Default Folder X on your Mac already, just select “Check for Update” from its menu in your menu bar. You’ll get the release notes and a button to automatically download and install version 6.1.1. Thanks for using and continuing to support Default Folder X!
When you select a folder from Default Folder X‘s menu in your menu bar, it opens that folder in the Finder. The Finder creates a new window to show the folder’s contents, but what if you want the folder to appear in a new tab in an existing Finder window instead?
Customers have asked numerous times for an “open folders in a new tab” option in Default Folder X, but I’ve been unable to add it. The Finder doesn’t provide a way for apps to ask for a new tab instead of a new window. I’ve filed enhancement requests with Apple for an API to do this, but those have fallen on deaf ears.
In the meantime, I noticed that you can use this option in System Settings to make the Finder open folders in a new tab instead of a new window:
The problem is that it extends the behavior to every app that supports tabbed windows. I discovered that, while I want new tabs rather than new windows in the Finder, I DON’T want that behavior in any other apps. Creating a new document in Numbers and having it added as a tab rather than a new window isn’t helpful to me – nor is it in Safari, where I explicitly create new tabs when I want new tabs, and expect new windows otherwise.
But a little investigation reveals that the option in System Settings just sets a global setting in User Defaults (the macOS preferences system). So what happens if we apply that option just to the Finder’s settings? You guessed it – you get folders opening in new tabs in the Finder, but the same old behavior in all other apps.
To open new tabs in the Finder, but new windows in all other apps, open Terminal (which is in /Applications/Utilities) and enter this command:
You’ll need to relaunch the Finder after doing so, either by logging out, restarting, or Control-Option-clicking on the Finder’s icon in the Dock and choosing “Relaunch” at the bottom of the menu.
To change the Finder’s behavior back to its default, use this command in Terminal:
and again relaunch the Finder. And that’s it! I hope this will help some people out there who’ve been unhappy with the way the Finder pops open a new window when you open a folder or reveal an item.
Rumor has it that macOS 15 Sequoia will be released next week at Apple’s “Glowtime” event, alongside iOS 18 and the new iPhone 16 models. Version 6.1 of Default Folder X has been in beta testing for several months and has been working well with Apple’s Sequoia betas, so I’m rolling it out in final form today.
You’ll need Default Folder X 6.1 if you’re running Sequoia – version 6.0.8 will just put up an alert saying that it doesn’t support macOS 15 – so today’s release should give many folks an opportunity to install the update before Sequoia arrives next Monday (or whenever Apple actually makes the upgrade available for download). The Default Folder X 6.1 update is free to everyone who’s already purchased a license for version 6.
In addition to Sequoia compatibility, Default Folder X 6.1 also opens favorite URLs from its Quick Search window, can open folders in the Warp terminal app, and fixes a number of bugs that cropped up in version 6.0.8. Full details and download links are on the What’s New page, or if you’re already running Default Folder X, just select “Check for Update” from its menu in your menu bar.
With macOS Sequoia this fall, using apps that need access to screen recording permissions will become a little bit more tedious. Apple is rolling out a change that will require you to give explicit permission on a weekly basis to these types of apps, and every time you reboot your Mac.
While I understand Apple’s desire to make it clear that you’ve given apps permission to record your screen, this seems like a nuisance. You have to click “Allow For One Week” each week for every app that’s actively capturing or streaming screen images. As 9to5Mac says, that’s going to get pretty tedious.
And if an app isn’t using Sequoia’s new “screen recording picker”, you’ll see this very technically worded warning. I’m not sure how non-technical users will respond to this:
Of course, the reason I’m grousing about this is because Default Folder X is affected. In some situations, DFX captures an image of an Open or Save dialog and displays it on top of the real file dialog as a “curtain” to hide what it’s doing while it manipulates the dialog. It doesn’t store or transmit the images – it just takes a screenshot of the file dialog, pops it up on the screen to obscure the dialog while it twiddles a menu, then throws away the screenshot.
Now Sequoia is throwing up scary weekly reminders about it recording “personal or sensitive information”. Sigh. Assuming that this new Sequoia “feature” is here to stay, I feel the only workable solution is to remove the screen captured façade and just put up a blank window to hide what Default Folder X is doing. This is … ugly. Here’s a quick illustration:
Here’s what Default Folder X is doing. Notice the menu popping up after opening “Empty Folder”:
Here’s what it currently looks like with a captured image overlayed to hide the menu activity. As intended, you don’t see anything at all:
Here’s what it looks like without screen recording, using a blank window to hide activity instead. There’s an unpleasant white flash:
I realize it’s not the end of the world – having that blank window flicker on the screen doesn’t change the functionality of Default Folder X. It’s just sloppy looking and aesthetically grating.
How you can take action
If you’d like to help out – and save yourself weekly warnings about the apps you use that capture screen images – please use Feedback Assistant to submit a bug about this to Apple. At the very least, they could add a “Don’t remind me again” checkbox to that warning alert and save us all from being pestered every week.
The bottom line
If Sequoia’s repeated reminders and dire warnings about privacy intrusion are here to stay, I don’t see any way forward except to eliminate the use of captured screen images. This reduces the quality and functionality of my software, but if the warnings are enough to put off some users, removing the dependent features is the only way to stop them from scaring people.
And just for the record, the use of captured screen images isn’t something new. Default Folder X and other applications have used this kind of trick for years to hide unpleasant side effects, clean up graphical glitches, or get information they can only get by looking at the screen. We’ve just come to a point where Apple feels it’s necessary to tell you about it on the off chance that some app is spying on you – which Default Folder X isn’t doing, but I do understand the potential danger.
