Browsing

The sidebar is one tree. Its roots, from top to bottom by default: Favorites, Home, Startup Disk, Applications (hidden until you turn it on), Cloud, External Disks, Recents, Shared, AirDrop, Network, Tags and Bin. Settings ▸ Sidebar shows or hides each one and sets the order by dragging. A click on a section title folds it; the app remembers which sections are folded.

Favorites are bookmarks: Desktop, Documents and Downloads at first, all removable. Add a folder with "Add to Favorites" in its context menu or by dropping it on the Favorites title; remove one from its context menu. The ⋯ menu beside the title has "Restore Default Favorites" and "Import Favorites from Finder", which reads the system file manager's own list (macOS keeps it private, so the import needs Full Disk Access).

Home and Startup Disk expand into folder trees. A folder that is really a link to another folder expands too, unless the link points back at one of its own ancestors.

Cloud lists iCloud Drive and other cloud folders. With Settings ▸ Sidebar ▸ "Show the apps' folders in iCloud Drive", the folders of the apps that keep documents in iCloud appear with their icons; the path bar then reads "iCloud Drive › Numbers", and Up goes back to iCloud Drive.

External Disks shows every mounted volume except the startup disk, each with an eject button. Disk images and other partitions of the internal disk are here too.

Recents lists the documents opened in the last 30 days (the period is in Settings ▸ Sidebar). Shared lists the iCloud Drive items shared by you or with you. AirDrop is a drop zone: drop files on it to open the system's AirDrop window.

Network lists your saved servers, the shares you are connected to (with a disconnect button) and the file servers found nearby. See Network and servers.

Tags starts folded and lists every tag in use: the colour tags first, then your own tags in alphabetical order. Choosing a tag shows every file in your Home folder that carries it, found through Spotlight, and you can narrow the result by name. Settings ▸ Sidebar ▸ "Show text tags as well as colour tags" controls whether named tags appear.

Bin is the Trash; it is red in every icon style.

Icon colours are set in Settings ▸ Sidebar ▸ Icons: soft tones, one per kind of place (the default); the system accent colour; or grey. Favorites take the colour of their folder icon. The iCloud symbol always uses the system accent colour, because Apple's licence for that symbol allows no other.

Tabs

⌘T opens a tab at the current folder, ⌘W closes it, ⇧⌘[ and ⇧⌘] switch between tabs, and a drag reorders them. A folder dropped on the tab bar opens in a new tab. The context menu of a tab offers Duplicate Tab, Move Tab to New Window, Edit Path…, Copy Path, Close Other Tabs, Close Tabs to the Left and Close Tabs to the Right; plugins can add items there. ⇧⌘W closes the window with all its tabs. The app saves the open windows and tabs when you quit and restores them at the next launch.

The path bar

The path bar shows the folder of the active pane. Click any folder in the path to go there. ⌘L (Go ▸ Go to Folder…) turns the bar into a text field: type or paste a path, ~ for Home included, and press Return. The field checks the path in the background, so a path on a slow volume does not freeze the window.

Back and Forward (⌘[ and ⌘], also ⌘← and ⌘→) walk the tab's history. ⌘↑ goes to the enclosing folder and selects the folder you came from. ⌫ with nothing selected goes Back.

Views

The file list has three views: as a list (⌘4), as icons in three sizes (⌘1, ⌘2, ⌘3) and as a gallery (⌘5), which shows one item large with a strip of thumbnails below. ⌘= and ⌘− zoom the icon and gallery views; ⌘0 returns to the normal size. In every view the arrow keys move the selection, Home and End jump to the first and last item, and Space opens Quick Look. In icon view and the gallery, a drag that starts between items selects what the rectangle touches; ⇧ adds to the selection and ⌘ toggles.

Columns. A right-click on the list header shows or hides any column except Name: Size, Kind, the dates (Modified, Created, Added, Accessed), Permissions, Owner, Tags, and the columns that plugins add, listed under their plugin's name. Drag a column to reorder it; Name stays first. Widths are kept as a share of the list's width, so they scale with the window. "Reset Columns" restores the default set. The values of the Permissions, Owner and date columns are read only while the column is shown.

Sorting. View ▸ Sort By offers Name, Size, Date Modified and Kind, Reverse Order and Folders First; the list header sorts by a click on a column. Sorting by Size takes measured folder sizes into account. Sorting by Tags puts items with named tags first, grouped by tag.

Each folder remembers its own view: the view mode, the icon size, the sorting, and which columns are shown, in which order and how wide. A folder you never changed uses the default. View ▸ "Apply to All Folders…" makes the current folder's view the default for every folder (after a confirmation); View ▸ "Reset This Folder to Default" forgets one folder's view; Settings ▸ General ▸ "Reset All Folders…" goes back to the standard list view everywhere. A renamed or moved folder keeps its view.

Hidden files (names starting with a dot, and files the system marks hidden) show with ⌃⌘H. ⌘H hides the app, as in every Mac app.

Folder sizes

The Size column measures the folders on screen in the background, on local disks only. While a folder is counted, a small spinner shows; a tree too big to finish within two seconds shows "> 12 GB" and is finished later, when nothing else is going on. Sizes are kept across launches and dropped when anything inside the folder changes, by any app, even while the app was not running. Properties show a folder's size counting up live.

Settings ▸ General ▸ "Calculate folder sizes in the background" turns the measuring off: the list then shows "—" for a folder, and a folder's size is counted only while Properties show it.

Two panels (Pro)

View ▸ Two Panels Side by Side or Two Panels Stacked splits a tab into two panes with their own folders. A click anywhere inside a pane makes it the active one, which the menus and the toolbar act on. "Compare with Other Pane" marks what differs between the two folders: items that exist only on one side, and items whose size or date differ, with filter chips and counts above both lists. The Lite edition shows one pane per tab; a session saved with two panes opens each folder in its own tab there.