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!
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.
The third beta build of Default Folder X 6.1 is available, adding support for the Warp terminal app and fixing several bugs that occurred in the previous beta (and in Default Folder X 6.0.8).
The other notable change is that this build won’t trigger Sequoia’s screen recording reminders nearly as often. Sequoia puts these up several times a day if an app is capturing screen images, which Default Folder X does as part of its normal functioning. Contrary to what this alert implies, DFX isn’t doing anything nefarious, just making its manipulations of Open and Save dialogs less jarring. The details are here. I’ve reduced the frequency of the reminders by abandoning Default Folder X’s automatic detection of dark / light mode in individual Open and Save dialogs, which required capturing an image from the screen.
To explain a bit: Some apps (including QuickTime Player, Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer and Rogue Amoeba Fission) let you change their appearance separately from the system-wide light / dark mode setting. There’s no generic way for another app like Default Folder X to tell which appearance they’re using other than taking a visual snapshot of one of the app’s file dialogs and checking to see whether it’s dark or light. I know that may sound stupid, but that’s the way macOS works – and honestly, for most normal, stand-alone applications this capability isn’t necessary, so I can understand why Apple doesn’t provide any sort of API to query an app’s appearance mode.
Anyway, without that information, Default Folder X may end up with the wrong light / dark mode for its toolbar around a file dialog, as well as for some of the controls within it – like this:
It doesn’t change the functionality that you get from Default Folder X, but it’s a bit jarring – and ugly. So, that’s the tradeoff – to stop Sequoia from whining at you every day, Default Folder X has to be less capable (and yes, I’ve filed a bug with Apple, but unless they get a lot of complaints I don’t think they’ll change this “feature” in Sequoia).
Default Folder X attempts to detect these situations using a different, application-specific method, and will currently do the right thing with the above-mentioned apps (QuickTime, Affinity apps and Fission). If you encounter this mismatch in other apps, let me know at DefaultFolderX@stclairsoft.com and I’ll do my best to find a way to detect the appearance for that app.
Grumble.
At any rate, a full change history and download links for Default Folder X 6.1b3 are available on the Beta Testing page.
There’s a new public beta of Default Folder X 6.1 available! In addition to updated compatibility with macOS 15 Sequoia, it improves support for web URLs that have been added as favorites. It also fixes a couple of graphical bugs.
The most useful change is the ability to go to URLs in your favorites using Quick Search. Type a bit of the name of a favorite and hit Return to open it in your browser.
Display of web URLs is better in the Favorites section of Default Folder X’s settings, and an issue with selected text appearing in the wrong color has also been fixed there. Flickering of previews in Open dialogs has also been corrected.
Note that you don’t need to be running Sequoia to use the beta – it will run on macOS 11 Big Sur and later. A full list of changes and download links is available on the Default Folder X Testing page.
Version 6.0.8 of Default Folder X is available now, delivering several new features, plus bug fixes for recently reported problems. The big changes are playable previews of video and audio files right below Open dialogs, and the ability to store web URLs in your Favorites.
While you could always use QuickLook to preview video and audio, doing so pops up a separate window with its playback volume always set to maximum. In contrast, Default Folder X’s previews let you see the length of a recording as soon as you select it, they remember your previous volume setting, and let you quickly scrub through audio and video without opening a separate window. If you spend lots of time working with audio or video, these little details make a difference.
Adding web URLs to your Default Folder X Favorites lets you open them quickly, including assigning keyboard shortcuts to them. I really wanted this myself to access web dashboards that I use often but don’t want to leave constantly open in my browser. So there you go 🙂 Oh, and if you’ve got the Default Folder X settings window open, you can just drag URLs straight from your browser to the Favorites list.
The other new “feature” is a warning when you run Default Folder X on a system that it doesn’t support. Folks who don’t install new updates of Default Folder X right away or who are running beta versions of upcoming macOS releases will run into these alerts. Hopefully they’ll resolve the confusion, disorientation and general angst people feel when Default Folder X is missing from their Open and Save dialogs. A button takes you to a web page where you can download a newer version that works with the OS you’re running.
Default Folder X 6.0.8 also includes a few bug fixes for Quick Search, keyboard shortcuts and issues when displaying long filenames. The full change history and download links are available on the What’s New page.
Last week, Apple dropped the first developer preview of macOS 15 Sequoia. The current release of Default Folder X – version 6.0.7 – does not support Sequoia because, prior to last week, I didn’t have any more information about it than you did.
Now that the first build of Sequoia is out, I’ve done some testing and made a few necessary adjustments. A new Sequoia-compatible public beta of Default Folder X is available on the Default Folder X Testing page. If you’re running Sequoia, this will get you back up and running with DFX. As usual, keep an eye out for updates because pre-release macOS builds are a moving target. More changes will probably be necessary as Sequoia progresses towards completion.
Default Folder X 6.1b1 also sports some new features that I’ve added based on user requests and my own personal needs. You can now preview audio and video files right in an Open dialog, even if you’re not using Column View.
And you can save web URLs as favorites, allowing you to quickly open often-used websites from Default Folder X’s menu or by using a keyboard shortcut. Display of very long filenames and their metadata has also been improved, and a few shortcomings (bugs, to be less generous) have been fixed.
So, in the last release of Default Folder X I added a somewhat complex (and relatively slow) feature to determine the correct name, location and icon for the Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive and Box Drive folders. It was only intended to be used for the top-level folders, so its slower speed wasn’t really an issue – it’s used infrequently.
But (there’s always a “but”, right?) when I deployed this new code within Default Folder X, it was inadvertently being called for every file and folder on any of those services. What resulted was a significant slow-down in Default Folder X’s menus, Quick Search, and any other place that the user-facing “display names” of items were shown in bulk (though only if the items happened to reside within one of those cloud services’ folders, so some of you may not have noticed an impact at all). Version 6.0.6 fixes this bug, and I even made that new code faster as well.
In addition, with some learnings gleaned from dealing with OneDrive again, I also remedied a long-standing problem with Microsoft Word. When you’re editing a document that’s stored in OneDrive, Word doesn’t internally represent that document as being on the local machine, but instead references it via a cloud-based URL. That caused problems for Default Folder X’s “default to the current document’s folder” feature, because as far as Word is concerned, there is no folder for that document on the Mac you’re using – it’s in the cloud.
With this release, Default Folder X translates Word’s OneDrive URL back into a location in the OneDrive folder on your Mac, so the “default to the current document’s folder” feature now works correctly.
Anyway, if you’re already running Default Folder X, just select “Check for Update” from its menu to get the new version. If not, you can download it and read the release notes on the Default Folder X What’s New page. And yes, the update is free if you’ve already bought a Default Folder X 6 license (thank you!).
Version 6.0.5 of Default Folder X is now available, delivering a number of new features and fixes for our award winning utility for navigating macOS Open and Save dialogs and the Finder.
We’ll need a little digression here to explain the first change. “File Provider” based cloud services such as OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive and Box all create their synced folders in a hidden location within your Library folder (in ~/Library/CloudStorage/ to be precise). The Finder then represents them the same way it does iCloud Drive, as disembodied “Locations” in the sidebar and in its “Go” menu.
In previous releases, Default Folder X would show these cloud service folders in their real locations. For example, Dropbox would be in ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox/. While that’s accurate and arguably helpful at times, it wasn’t consistent with what you saw in the Finder, so it could be confusing for some folks. Version 6.0.5 of Default Folder X corrects this by mimicking what the Finder does. Cloud services are now shown as top-level locations, rather than being contained within the CloudStorage folder.
A less confusing change in Default Folder X 6.0.5 is the ability to paste a whole path into the Quick Search window. This does exactly what you think it’d do – it takes you to that location. If you’re using a file dialog, the dialog will switch to show the files and folders at that location. If you’re not, Quick Search will open that folder or file in the Finder. Pretty straightforward and very quick if you’re a person that’s dealing with paths a lot.
In addition, Default Folder X’s Finder drawer and Drag Zone now “follow” files and folders that you’ve dragged into them. If you add a folder to the drawer, then later rename it or drag it to a new location, the reference to it in the drawer will still work. Previously, Default Folder X would just remove the item from the drawer or drag zone once it could no longer find it at its previous location and / or name (which was admittedly kinda lame if you left stuff in the drawer for long periods).
There are also a number of bug fixes, plus improved compatibility with QSpace and Alfred.
You can get full details on the Default Folder X release page, or by choosing “Check for Update” if you’re already running Default Folder X. This update is free if you’ve purchased a license or upgrade for Default Folder X 6. If you’re still running Default Folder X 5.7.8 or earlier, there’s an upgrade fee that’s detailed on the Default Folder X Upgrades page.
