#Totalfinder installation code

We don’t have any release timetable set at the moment, but we will make announcements at the appropriate time. It is intended for Apple Silicon macs only (at this time), and is currently in private alpha testing.

#Totalfinder installation code

It is a significant challenge to achieve an equivalent experience without the level of access that code injection provided us, but we believe it will be more than usable.

This version will work without modifying the system, and works with SIP enabled. It’s not all bad news! For a while now we have been working on a new version of TotalSpaces, TotalSpaces3. It also uses a similar code injection mechanism to TotalFinder and TotalSpaces.Īlso Aditya Vaidyam independently discovered some important APIs we use, documented here.įinally I’d like to mention and credit that the original reversing of the Core Graphics APIs was done by Richard J Wareham, and something may still be learned from this code. Interested persons may want to look at Yabai which uses some of the same APIs that TotalSpaces2 does (and I believe early on reversed some TotalSpaces2 code - we don’t mind!). It is unlikely we will make these apps open source. We will cease selling new licenses in the summer. We will continue to provide limited support TotalFinder and TotalSpaces2 until the end of 2021.

We will not work on making TotalFinder or TotalSpaces2 work with the next version of macOS, and they will not be ported to Apple Silicon macs. So we have to admit that it’s the end of the road for TotalFinder and TotalSpaces2. However, the support in Big Sur is imperfect, and we are not able to support Apple Silicon macs at all. As it happened, we did better - we continued to make releases in 20, bringing support to Catalina and now to Big Sur. This is due to the additional protections Apple are adding, the changing technology, and more generally the lack of Apple provided APIs to do the kind of system modifications that our customers want.Īt that time we promised to support the products during the lifetime of Mojave. What now?Īt the end of this post from 2018 we noted that TotalFinder and TotalSpaces2 have had a good run, but it is certainly becoming more difficult to support these products. We found that some people preferred the TotalFinder tabs, but this did reduce the relevance of TotalFinder to many people. Turning SIP off was uncomfortable to do (requiring two reboots), and uncomfortable for us to recommend.Īlso notable was that Apple to some extent “Sherlocked” TotalFinder by implementing their own tabs implementation in Finder. This prevented modification of the system software, and had to be turned off for the installation or running of our products. Over the years Apple has erected many obstacles, the most important of which was their “rootless” implementation, System Integrity Protection.

Amazingly, TotalFinder has been available for over 11 years, and TotalSpaces for almost 9 years. We were able to replace that functionality, and add some configurability and improvements of our own.Īs time went by, we continued to develop these products and support them. In April 2012 we released TotalSpaces for macOS Lion, since the grid spaces functionality that we absolutely loved was removed by Apple after the Snow Leopard release.

We think that TotalFinder was able to really make a difference in the usability of Finder, and we found there was a great deal of support for it. Although many still remember that operating system with fondness, the Finder implementation of the time was ripe for improvement. An early version of TotalFinder was first released in November 2009 during the golden days of Snow Leopard.