Docs

A dual-pane file manager. The active pane is the Source; the other pane is the Destination. Copy and move always go from Source to Destination.

Open Help from Help → maXfolders Help, or press ⌘?. Every key, toolbar button, and menu command is in the Shortcut Guide below (F1 in the app). In the app, Test Shortcut waits for a combination and jumps to that row if it is listed.

Help buttons: each window and sheet has a round question-mark button — at the trailing end of the title bar, or in the sheet's title row. Click it to open Help on that feature's own topic, so Bulk Rename, Bulk Convert and Copy Template land on their own section instead of the top of Bulk Operations. New in 1.6.75.

Bringing windows forward: choosing Transfers, Preview, Find, Bulk, Help or any other window again — from a menu, the toolbar, a function key or the right-click menu — brings it to the front when it is open behind another window, and restores it if it is minimised. A command that toggles a window, such as Preview (F3), still closes it when it is already in front. New in 2.1.3.

App language: choose English (US, UK, Australia, or Canada), French, Spanish, German, Greek, Bulgarian, or Simplified or Traditional Chinese in Settings → General → Language, or leave it on System to follow Language & Region. Choosing one relaunches maXfolders. Menus, alerts, Help, the Shortcut Guide, What's New, and the Finder, Share, and Quick Look extensions all follow it. New in 1.6.76.

Function Keys, in Settings → Function Keys and at the top of the Shortcut Guide, chooses what F1–F12 do. Pick a layout — Classic (the default, used throughout these docs), Commander, Navigator, Organizer, or Compare & Sync — or change any single key to another command. The bar along the bottom of the window, the toolbar tips, and the guide's own rows follow straight away, and the choice is saved. Restore Default goes back to Classic.

Three more layouts PRO — Developer, Media, and Remote & Cloud — put Git Assistant, the embedded terminal, Media Info, Undo Last Operation, and cloud providers on F-keys, and those commands can be given to any single key too.

The window toolbar starts with just two buttons: Find on the left and the Preview eye on the right, which fills in while the Preview window is open. Everything else is a click away where it applies: each pane's own buttons beside its path (Tools, Choose Folder, New Folder, Terminal, Finder and Connect), the sidebar button before each path field that shows or hides Favourites, the pane button at the right edge that shows or hides the second pane, the right-click menu, the menu bar and the keys. The toolbar shows Icon Only by default. Control-click the toolbar or choose View → Customize Toolbar… to show, hide or rearrange groups; that layout is saved.

Settings → General → Toolbar chooses which buttons the toolbar offers: Focused (the default: Find, Hidden Files and Preview), Minimal (find, one or two panes, go up, hidden files, go to, new folder, copy, move, delete, the Shelf, preview and help), Everyday, Remote & Sync, Standard (every button except the text-size pair) and Power User. Each set remembers its own customised layout, so a layout you arranged earlier comes back when you choose that set again. Every set has the Hidden Files switch.

Each pane has a Tools button beside its path. It makes that pane the Source, then lists the tools that work on its selection or folder: Inspect & Edit (Quick Edit, Compare Files, Version History, Get Media Info, Calculate Checksum, Permissions), Organize (Sort Into Folders, Copy Template and Bulk Operations), Media (Media Show, Make Contact Sheet) and Understand This Folder (Ask and Explain). The Tools menu in the menu bar has the same tools for the Source pane, plus Utilities. A tool that needs the trial, the unlock or maXfolders Pro is shown with a lock; choosing it explains what unlocks it. After the trial starts or you unlock maXfolders, Hide Unavailable Pro Tools at the bottom of a pane's Tools menu leaves the Pro-only tools out of the panes (Settings → General → Toolbar brings them back).

Tools → Developer → Git Assistant PRO is part of maXfolders Pro; the App Store app shows it locked.

Every button you can add. Left: Find, then Folder, View, Panes, Size. Right: File, Transfer, Archive, Help. Copy and Move point toward Destination.

Apple Intelligence features appear only on a Mac with Apple Intelligence — macOS 26 or later on Apple silicon, with Apple Intelligence turned on in System Settings — and Ask This Folder also needs macOS 27. They run on your Mac with Apple's on-device model. Where Settings → Apple Intelligence allows Private Cloud Compute (App Store edition), Ask This Folder, What Changed?, Sort Into Folders, Compare Subfolders, Explain Log, Folder analysis advice and Quick Edit's Explain (in text and in the Hex view) send only a request too large for your Mac to Apple's Private Cloud Compute, label what it wrote Private Cloud Compute, and answer on your Mac when it can't be reached. Settings turns Private Cloud Compute off for all of them or for each one. None of them copies, renames or deletes anything: they answer, summarise and fill in forms, and you press Run. Settings → Apple Intelligence turns all of them off at once, or each one on its own.

Ask This Folder (Tools → Understand This Folder → Ask This Folder…, or Control-click a folder) answers a question about the documents in the Source folder and its subfolders — “Which contract has the arbitration clause?”, “When does the lease end?”. Spotlight finds the documents that match, so there's nothing to index. Apple Intelligence reads the matching passages of PDFs, Word and text files (scanned PDFs through text recognition) and answers in a sentence or two that names the file and page. Click the file and Preview opens at the passage, highlighted. The quote under an answer is really in the file; when a date or number in the answer isn't in the passages, you get the closest passage instead. Only files Spotlight has indexed are searched.

Ask These Documents (Tools → Understand This Folder → Ask These Documents…, or Control-click in a pane) answers a question about the PDFs, Word, RTF and text files the Source pane shows — or only the selected ones — such as “Which invoice is from March?” or “What's the total on the Acme receipt?”. maXfolders reads each document's dates, amounts and invoice or reference numbers itself, so a question about a month finds the document dated 14.03, not the one that only mentions March. Apple Intelligence answers from those facts and the best passages and lists the documents it means: each one it was shown and, when you named a time, one whose dates fit. Click a document to open it in Preview. Text already read — by Ask These Documents, Ask This Folder or a Preview summary — is kept and not read again until the file changes; text from other apps' data and the Photos and media libraries is never kept. Up to 200 documents at a time. When Settings allows it, a large request uses Private Cloud Compute.

What Changed? in File Comparator turns the comparison into a short, plain-language list — “Prices are now fixed for 18 months instead of 12; the payment schedule moved to Appendix B.” PDFs and Word documents are compared by their text first, so it works on the versions in Version History too. The Compare Folders sheet has one as well: what's only in Source, only in Destination, and which copies are newer, with the counts taken from the comparison. A sentence with a number that isn't in the comparison is left out.

Summaries in Preview: above a document, PDF or code file, Preview shows a two-line summary and the key dates and names in it, each one checked to be written in the file. Scanned PDFs are read with text recognition first, and a long document is summarised from its first part. Hide Summaries turns them off; Settings → Apple Intelligence turns them back on.

Explain This Folder (Tools menu, or Control-click a folder) says what an unfamiliar folder is — “an Xcode project with a Swift package” — from file names, sizes and dates alone, without opening a file. Underneath it lists what the folder holds, what can be regenerated (DerivedData, .build, node_modules, Pods and the like) and where the newest work is.

A describe field sits above Find, Bulk Rename, Bulk Convert, Preflight's options, the Compare Folders sheet and Copy Template. Type what you want — “make these web-ready: 2000px long edge, strip GPS, JPEG 80%”, “skip files that are already there”, “only copy what's missing”, “into Clients/{year}/{project name}” — and click Fill In. What you state outright is read exactly; anything vague is marked suggested. A line says what was set, Undo Fill puts it back, and nothing runs until you click. Copy Template destinations can use {year}, {month}, {day}, {date} and {project name} (the selected item's name, or the Source folder's when several are selected).

Do… (⇧⌘P, Actions → Do…) is one line for everything: say what you want and Apple Intelligence opens the right window — Find, Bulk Rename, Bulk Convert, Copy Template, Compare Folders, Ask This Folder or Explain This Folder — and fills it in for you to check.

Git Assistant PRO (⌥⌘G, Tools → Developer → Git Assistant…, Control-click in a git folder, or click the branch badge on a pane header) works on the git repository in the Source pane with your own git, so your config, hooks and commit signing apply. The header's Pull, Push, Sync and Publish buttons fetch, pull and push for you; when a remote asks for a password or passphrase they carry on in the embedded terminal. It fetches when it opens (switch that off in its Remote menu), and after a rebase, squash or amend of a pushed branch it offers Force Push instead of Pull. Commit: tick files to stage them, or stage, unstage and discard single hunks from the diff; with nothing staged, Commit All takes every change. A pre-commit check flags what shouldn't go in — keys and passwords, merge conflict markers, .DS_Store and build output, big files, leftover print and console.log lines, new TODOs. Write Message drafts the commit message in the style of the repository's recent commits, and Split into Commits groups your changes into focused commits — code with its tests and the docs about it — each with its own message. Control-click a file to discard its changes (new files go to the Trash), stash it or add it to .gitignore. Discards, commits, deleted branches, merges, rebases and squashes can be taken back with Undo in the bar that reports them.

In Git Assistant PRO, Branches lists local and remote branches with how far ahead and behind each is, which are merged and which were deleted on the remote. New Branch takes a name — or a description like “fix the login timeout”, turned into a name in the repository's style — and Apple Intelligence can name it from your changes. Switching with uncommitted changes asks whether to bring them along or leave them on the branch you're leaving; changes you leave come back when you switch back. Merge, rebase, rename and delete are one click; Clean Up deletes the branches whose work is merged or gone from the remote; Stashes lists what you've put aside, to pop, apply or drop.

In Git Assistant PRO (new in 1.6.71): Show in Destination, on a commit in History or on the From version in What Changed, lists that version in the other pane, read-only and without checking it out — open a file, compare it with today's, or copy an old one out; click the version label on the pane to go back. Open Beside, in Branches, checks another branch out in a worktree next to the repository and opens it in the other pane; leaving it offers to remove the worktree. History's search takes words from the subjects, or author:, file: and added: to find commits by someone, touching a file, or adding a piece of text. Commits you haven't pushed can be tidied in place from a commit's Actions: Fixup folds it into the commit before, Reword… changes its message, and Move Older and Move Newer reorder them (or drag one in the list) — Undo puts them back. Drag a commit out of History as a .patch file, or drop a patch on a pane inside a repository to apply it; Branches → Recover lists commits the reflog still remembers, to restore as a branch. In a diff, select lines to stage, unstage or discard just those, and each line shows who last changed it, with Show This Commit. Review has Apple Intelligence comment on the staged diff: a likely bug, a missing test, a change that doesn't match the message. A new untracked folder can be ignored in one click, pull requests show whether their checks pass, and a folder that holds several repositories lists them to pick from.

In Git Assistant PRO, History lists the branch's commits, or one file's (Control-click a file → Git → Git History…); Explain This Commit says in plain words what a commit does, and a commit can be undone, reverted, cherry-picked or start a new branch. History keeps loading earlier commits as you scroll, back to the first. Graph draws every branch at once: a colored line for each, joining where they merge, with the branch and tag names on the commits they point at. What Changed compares two versions — the last release tag and now, unless you pick others — with the count of commits, authors and changed lines; Write Release Notes groups the commits into New, Improved and Fixed, each line tied to its commits. Tag Release suggests the next version (major, minor or patch, from the commits), writes the tag's message from the notes, and can add a CHANGELOG.md entry, push the tag and create the GitHub release. Pull Request checks the current branch against main: its size, how far behind main it is, work-in-progress and merge commits, code changed with no tests, and the pre-commit rules. Update from main rebases or merges, Squash into One Commit tidies the branch, Write Description drafts a title and description, Guide the Review points at the files that most need a careful look, and Create Pull Request pushes the branch and opens the pull request with GitHub's gh — or opens the new pull request page on GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket.

In Git Assistant PRO, when a merge, rebase, cherry-pick, revert or stash stops on conflicts, the Resolve tab opens. Each conflict shows Current and Incoming side by side (and the original, when git wrote it); choose Keep Current, Keep Incoming or Keep Both, or take one side for the whole file. Suggestions come from the rules — both sides only added lines, or differ only in spacing — and Explain Conflict has Apple Intelligence say what each side changed and which way to settle it. Then Continue, Skip Commit or Abort.

Ask Git PRO turns a sentence into a git command — “undo my last commit but keep the changes”, “move my changes to a new branch called login-fix”, “when was fetchUser removed?”, “add debug.log to .gitignore”, “restore the deleted file setup.md”. Apple Intelligence picks from a vetted list of commands; the branch, file, commit or text comes from what you typed, and each command is marked Safe, Rewrites history or Can lose work. Run in Terminal runs it in the pane's embedded terminal — a command that rewrites history or can lose work is only typed, for you to check and press Return. Staging, committing, branches, syncing, conflicts, history and the checks work on any Mac; the Apple Intelligence parts appear on Macs with Apple Intelligence and each has its own switch in Settings → Apple Intelligence. Git Assistant needs git (Apple's Command Line Tools or Homebrew's).

See the screenshots on Features.

Add or hide the second pane: the first time you open maXfolders, it asks whether to start with one pane or two. You can change that at any time: Panes in the toolbar, the button at the right edge of the pane area, or View → Show Second Pane (⌥⌘2), shows the second pane straight away, with the tabs it had when you last hid it; change its folder or connect to a server from inside the pane. Panes, or View → Hide Second Pane, puts it away and keeps its tabs. The left pane stays the Source when the second one appears, and Swap Panes, Flip, Compare Folders, Sync Browsing and Copy to Other Pane need the second pane to be shown; with one pane, Copy… and Move… ask for a folder. The pane is the same in every state: it does not depend on the trial or the unlock.

Click a pane (or its Source / Dest label) to make it the Source. Tab or the toolbar Flip button flips which pane is the Source; the file selector stays in the Source pane. Swap (View → Swap Panes, ⌘U) instead swaps the two pane folders, including their tabs.

File lists

Each pane lists files in a native Finder-style table with Name, Size, Date Modified, and Permissions by default. The list updates on its own when files appear, disappear, or change in that folder. Bigger / Smaller (or View → Bigger / Smaller / Actual Size, ⌘+ / ⌘- / ⌘0) change the list text; both panes share that size and it is saved. Control-click a column header (or View → Columns) to add Date Created, Date Added, Date Last Opened, Kind, and the rest. The Permissions column shows each file or folder's Unix permissions, e.g. rwxr-xr-x. New in 1.6.13, and populated for FTP and SFTP PRO listings too as of 1.6.17. Click a header to sort. View → Refresh (⌘R) reloads every tab in both panes.

Folder sizes & computed columns

Folder sizes and the other computed columns fill in after the list appears, so a folder never waits for them. The Size column adds up each folder in the background, with a spinner until its total is known, and the totals stay current as files change inside them; View → Calculate Folder Sizes turns this off and on (it's on by default).

Some folders macOS guards with a privacy question of its own (Desktop, Documents, Downloads, iCloud Drive, your Photos library, and the Music and TV media folders) show — in the Size column until you have opened them in maXfolders, so a folder size never makes macOS ask. Other apps’ data in Library → Containers is never counted automatically. A folder that contains any of these shows its size with a +, such as 12.4 GB+: at least that much was counted, and the protected folders were left out. The + marks a measured lower bound, not an estimate.

When a pane’s sizes are incomplete, a small warning outline appears at the end of its path, and each partial (+) or unavailable (—) size has the same small triangle after it; point at the triangle to see why. Click it, click the size, or Control-click the folder and choose Size Details…, to see what was left out, grouped by what can be done. Calculate Full Size… first explains what maXfolders will read, then reads each folder once to count it; macOS may ask, allow it straight away or refuse it, and each folder shows the result in place: Counted, Still partial or Unavailable. In maXfolders from the Mac App Store, when a folder can't be read with the access maXfolders already has — even inside a folder you chose before — the calculation asks you to select that folder in a macOS folder dialog; it is then counted, and the same access is used everywhere in the app and after a relaunch. A protected folder you open in a pane is remembered the same way, so sizes count it from then on. A folder macOS offers no permission request for says so, and stays out of the size. If macOS has remembered a refusal, Open Privacy Settings… takes you there; change it, then choose Try Again. Done closes the details and leaves the sizes as they are. The size bars show shares of what was counted.

Find, Folder analysis, Save File List, Ask This Folder and Explain This Folder follow the same rule: protected folders below the folder you chose are left out rather than read, and listed with the results — together with any folder that couldn’t be read — along with a button to include them after macOS asks. Preflight notes such folders without reading them, and they are copied as usual. Create Archive stops with a message naming a folder it can’t read, instead of making an archive that is silently missing it.

Date Taken, Camera, and Lens come from a photo's EXIF data (Date Taken and Camera from a video's metadata too); Dimensions and Megapixels from photos and videos; Duration, Codec, Bit Rate, and Sample Rate from video and audio; Pages from PDFs. Days Since Opened counts the days since an item was last opened in an app, as macOS records it, or shows Never — sort on it to find what to archive. Checksum shows a file's SHA-256 once you Control-click it and choose Tools → Calculate Checksum; Copy Checksum then copies it, in shasum format for several files.

A value still on its way shows …. Sorting on a column that's still filling in puts the known values first and moves rows into place as the rest arrive. The Git column sorts too, with changed files first. Computed columns work in local folders; remote connections and archive contents leave them blank. Both editions. New in 1.6.57.

Size bars

Size bars shade each Size cell by that item's share of everything listed in the folder, like a treemap you don't have to open, so the space hogs stand out at a glance. Folders join in once their size has been added up. View → Show Size Bars (or Control-click a column header) turns them off and on; they're on by default. Hover a size to see its share as a percentage, and drag the Size column wider for longer bars.

Path bar

Each pane has a native path bar. Click a folder or archive in the breadcrumb to go there. Click the path field to type or paste a path — as you type, matching local subfolders appear below it with the top match highlighted; Return fills in the highlighted match and keeps predicting its subfolders, or goes to the typed path if nothing is highlighted. Arrow keys move the highlight; Esc dismisses the predictions, and a second Esc restores the current folder path and leaves the field. New in 1.6.12.

Go → Path Field (⌘L, ⌃L, or F12) focuses the Source pane path field with its path selected, ready to type or paste another. Saved FTP, SFTP PRO and cloud connections are in Go → Manage Connections….

Favourites sidebar

The Favourites sidebar at the left of the window keeps the places you use most a click away. Show or hide it with the sidebar button just before either pane’s path field, or View → Show Favorites (⌃⌘S); your choice is remembered, and every window and tab shares the same sidebar. A new installation starts with it shown; an existing one starts with it hidden until you show it.

It begins with your home folder and your mounted disks above the line, and Applications, Desktop, Documents and Downloads below it, followed by any folders you bookmarked in earlier versions. Click a favourite to open it in the Source pane; Back (⌘[) returns to where you were. Drag a favourite to reorder it or move it across the line, drag the current folder’s icon or name from the breadcrumb to add it where you drop it, or click + below the list and choose Add to Top Section… or Add to Bottom Section…. Go → Add to Favorites adds the Source pane folder too. Control-click a favourite and choose Remove from Favorites, or select it and press Delete — only the shortcut goes, never the folder. A disk that isn’t mounted stays listed, dimmed, until it’s back. Free in every edition. New in 2.2.4.

Make your own groups: click + below the list and choose New Group…, or Control-click the sidebar. A group appears below the bottom section with its name as a heading. Click the heading to collapse or expand it, drag the heading to reorder groups, or Control-click it to Rename Group… or Delete Group — deleting a group keeps its favourites, at the end of the bottom section. Drag favourites into a group, or drop one on a collapsed group’s heading. To reorder without dragging, Control-click a favourite and choose Move Up, Move Down or Move To.

The star button between each pane’s path field and its Tools button adds that pane’s folder to any section or group, or to a new group; if the folder is already a favourite, it moves it or removes it. The star is filled while the folder is in Favourites.

Pane header buttons

• Choose Folder
• New Folder
• Open Terminal
• Embedded Terminal PRO
• Open in Finder
• Show Favourites
• Add to Favourites

The folder icon chooses a folder or archive. The terminal icon opens Terminal.app in that pane’s folder (unavailable inside a zip or tar). The Finder icon opens that folder in Finder, or reveals the archive file if you are inside a zip or tar. The sidebar button shows or hides the Favourites sidebar, and the star after the path field adds the folder to any Favourites section or group. Go → Go to Path… (⇧⌘G), Open Terminal (⌥⌘T), Open in Finder (⌥⌘F), and Add to Favorites also apply to the Source pane.

PRO The green terminal icon toggles an embedded terminal below that pane’s file list — a colored, interactive shell running in-app, without switching to Terminal.app. Drag the bar above it to resize; each pane remembers its own height and whether it is open. Go → Show Embedded Terminal (F11 or ⌃⌘T) toggles it for the Source pane. Unavailable inside a zip/tar archive. New in 1.6.4. The toolbar's text-size slider is shared by both panes and saved, and Copy copies the whole terminal, including scrollback; its colors follow the theme when you switch between light and dark (1.6.70). A small toolbar above the embedded terminal always offers Clear Terminal; inside a git working tree it also offers Git Status, Fetch, Pull, and Push (committing is in Git Assistant). These run as real git commands in the pane’s own shell, using your actual git config and credentials. New in 1.6.11. The shell sends a cd to keep up whenever the pane's folder changes, rather than staying at the folder it was opened in. New in 1.6.25. On a remote FTP or SFTP tab, the same icon instead shows a live command/response log — every command sent and reply received on the connection, as it happens — with Clear, Copy All, and find-in-text/font-size controls. New in 1.6.16. SFTP has no plaintext wire protocol to show directly, so it logs one command per operation instead (CONNECT, LIST, MKD, RMD, DELE, RENAME, RETR/STOR, DISCONNECT). New in 1.6.30.

Remote (FTP/SFTP)

Connect to Server… (⌘K, or the network icon on a pane header) opens an FTP or SFTP connection and browses it like a local folder — drag files between a local and a remote pane to upload or download. Manage Connections… lists saved connections to reconnect, edit, or delete. Passwords and key passphrases are kept in the macOS Keychain; SFTP host keys are pinned the first time you connect. Compare, Find, and archive browsing are local-only and stay disabled on a remote pane. New in 1.6. FTP and SFTP (the encrypted variant) work in maXfolders and Pro. In the Mac App Store edition, pick a private key with Choose… so macOS lets maXfolders read it again next time; it can’t see ~/.ssh on its own.

Folder tabs

Each pane has native folder tabs. File → New Tab (⌘T) or + opens another tab. Extra tabs can be closed (×, ⌘W, or Control-click); the last tab in a pane stays open. Tabs are saved and restored.

Backspace or Go → Parent Folder goes up one directory. Double-click a folder, a zip/tar archive, or .. to enter it. Double-click a file (or press Return) to open it with the default application. Click the name of a selected file or folder to rename it in the list, like Finder.

Back and Forward retrace the places a tab has shown, which is not the same as Parent: after going up from your home folder to Users, Back returns to your home folder, and Forward goes to Users again. Use the arrows before each pane's breadcrumb, Go → Back (⌘[) and Go → Forward (⌘]), or your mouse's Back and Forward buttons over a pane. Each tab keeps its own history until you quit maXfolders. Go → Home Folder (⇧⌘H) opens your home folder in the Source pane.

Hidden (⇧⌘.) shows or hides hidden files in both panes. Hidden names stay dimmed when shown. The toggle stays highlighted while they are shown.

iCloud Drive

Go → iCloud Drive sends the Source pane straight to your iCloud Drive folder — the same one Finder's iCloud Drive sidebar item shows; it reports an error if iCloud Drive isn't turned on. A file iCloud hasn't downloaded locally yet still lists normally; Control-click it (or a folder containing one) and choose Download Now to fetch it in the background instead of waiting for it to open on demand. New in 1.6.47.

Folder compare

Compare (⌃Y) checks the two selected folders by name. Identical items are green, missing items red, and same-name items with a different timestamp orange. Then Keep Source, Keep Destination, or Cancel, plus Keep newer (on by default). Those actions do not change Source or delete extras. Click Compare again or press Esc to turn it off.

Compare Subfolders… (View → Compare Subfolders…, ⌃⌥Y, or the button in the Compare sheet) looks below the visible listing: it reads both folders' whole trees and opens Folder Differences, one row per subfolder with the files only in Source, only in Destination, different and identical. A folder missing on one side is one line, not one per file; a file with the same name and size in another folder is counted as moved; folders it can't read are listed, never guessed. Double-click a row to show that subfolder in both panes. Nothing is copied. With Apple Intelligence, What Changed? explains the differences in a few sentences from those counts; a large comparison goes to Private Cloud Compute when Settings allows it. Apple Intelligence

Sync Browsing

Sync Browsing (⌃⇧Y, or the toolbar toggle next to Compare) is enabled only when both panes' current folders have the same name — the signal that they're comparable trees. Turning it on pins each pane's current folder as a root, then keeps both panes at the same relative subpath as you navigate either one — enter a subfolder on one side and the other follows, if a same-named folder exists there. Handy for comparing parallel project or backup trees. It turns itself off automatically if a pane moves outside its root, reaches a subpath the other side doesn't have, switches tabs, or the synced tab closes. New in 1.6.24. Either pane (or both) may now be a remote or cloud connection — FTP, SFTP, S3, WebDAV, or Dropbox — so it also mirrors navigation between a local folder and its remote backup, or between two remote trees. New in 1.6.27.

WebDAV, S3, and Dropbox are in maXfolders and Pro. iCloud Photos is part of maXfolders Pro only, at maxfolders.com.

Add Cloud Provider… (or the network icon on a pane header) connects to a WebDAV, S3, or Dropbox account and browses it like a local folder, the same way Connect to Server… does for FTP/SFTP — drag files to upload or download, or rename, delete, and create folders remotely. Manage Cloud Providers… lists saved cloud connections to reconnect, edit, or delete. New in 1.6.21.

WebDAV and S3

WebDAV connects with a server endpoint URL, username, and password. S3 — and S3-compatible services such as MinIO, Backblaze B2, and DigitalOcean Spaces — connects with an access key ID, secret key, bucket, and region, plus an optional custom endpoint and path-style addressing toggle. Both keep their secret in the macOS Keychain, never in settings.json.

Dropbox

Dropbox connects with a personal access token instead of a full Dropbox sign-in. Sign in to the Dropbox App Console and create a Scoped access app (App folder or Full Dropbox), enable the files.metadata.read, files.content.read, and files.content.write permissions, then generate an access token on the app's Settings tab under OAuth 2 — Dropbox only shows it once. Paste that token into Access Token in Add Cloud Provider; Base Path is optional and defaults to the Dropbox root. The token is stored in the Keychain, and is removed automatically if you delete the saved connection. If Dropbox ever rejects the token (revoked, or the app deleted), edit the saved connection and paste a freshly generated one.

iCloud Photos PRO

iCloud Photos needs no credentials at all: pick it in Add Cloud Provider and click Connect, and macOS asks to allow access to your Mac's Photos library (which mirrors iCloud Photos when that's turned on) — read/export only, nothing is deleted without maXfolders' own confirmation. Browse albums or All Photos, and copy, move, or delete with rule-based Bulk criteria (album, media type, favorites, screenshots, date, size). A Bulk Move exports first and removes the originals in a single batched Photos-library change, so you see one system confirmation for the whole job instead of one per photo. New in 1.6.47.

A pane browsing a git working tree shows its current branch as a badge next to the path field. A Git column (Control-click a column header, or View → Columns) shows each file's staged or modified state.

Preview gains a Show Diff toggle for a file with a git status: it shows what changed since the last commit instead of the plain file. The branch badge, Git column, and diff stay live as branches switch or changes are staged, without a manual reload. New in 1.6.8.

Find (Actions → Find…, the toolbar Find button, or ⌃F) opens a separate window. Look in starts as the Source pane folder. Named accepts wildcards such as *.swift or several masks separated by semicolons. Search all subdirectories is on by default. Search file content looks inside files for the Containing text, with HEX-mode, Whole words, Case sensitive, and Regular expression; for a PDF it searches the document's text.

Describe — natural-language Find: on a Mac with Apple Intelligence (macOS 26 or later), a Describe field sits above the form. Type what you're after in your own words — PDFs from last spring over 5 MB that mention Hilton — and click Fill In. Apple's on-device model fills in Named, Containing, and the Advanced size and date filters, and lists what it set. Nothing is searched until you click Find Now, so you check and change every field first; Undo Fill puts the form back. It runs entirely on your Mac and only ever fills in the form. Dates such as “last spring” or “since January” are worked out exactly. On a Mac without Apple Intelligence the field isn't shown.

Advanced filters: Hidden, Read-only, Directory, Alias, Archive, size range, and modification date. Clear Form puts every filter back to its default; Look in stays.

Select a result and Go to Source, or double-click / Return, to open that file’s folder in the Source pane. Esc stops a running search, or closes Find.

Save List… saves the found items as a file in the selected (Source) pane's folder. Pick CSV (Name, Relative Path, Full Path, Size, Date Modified, Kind — opens in Numbers or Excel) or Markdown, then type a file name. The Markdown file starts with the search criteria and root folder, then lists every result in a table with a link to the file. The pane must show a folder on this Mac, not a server or an archive.

A Search inside archives (zip, tar) toggle also matches files inside any archive found during the search, by name or, with Search file content on, by their contents too — results behave like any other match, including Go to Source, Open, and Edit. New in 1.6.10.

A separate window. It stays closed at launch. Once it is open, selecting a file in the Source pane updates it. Position and size are remembered by default; a Remember window position toggle in Settings → Windows can turn that off, so it always opens centered over the main window instead. New in 1.6.19. The file’s name, size, date, and kind appear in the title bar, with its Finder icon and an Open button.

Source-code and config files (JSON, XML, YAML, and the rest) always preview as plain text. Extension-less names such as Makefile, Dockerfile, LICENSE, README, and dotfiles such as .gitignore are recognized by name.

Markdown files (.md, .markdown) are shown formatted: headings, lists and task lists, quotes, code blocks, tables, and images stored next to the file. Links work — web and email links open in your browser or mail app, links to other files open them in their default app, and links to a #heading scroll to it. Switch to Source above the document to see the Markdown itself, with the text preview's find field.

Open it with F3, ⌃P, the toolbar Preview button, or Control-click → Preview on a single file. Preview of a file inside an archive extracts that entry first.

Quick Edit button: for a text or code file, the Preview toolbar has a Quick Edit button that closes Preview and opens the file in Quick Edit.

Files over 5MB show a banner instead of the usual text preview, with a button to open a new Large File Viewer window — the Preview toolbar or Control-click → Open With → Open in Large File Viewer also open it directly, for any file. It streams the file in pages instead of loading it whole, so paged navigation, jump-to-line, and find-in-file stay fast regardless of size. Oversized binary files get an Open with Default App / Reveal in Finder fallback for now. New in 1.6.26. A line-number gutter runs alongside the text; long lines scroll horizontally instead of wrapping, keeping the numbers aligned. New in 1.6.27.

Open and Edit

Open (Return or ⌃O) launches selected files with the default application. Open With lists other apps; Other… can save a default for that file kind. Always Open With… saves immediately.

Edit (F4 or ⌃E) opens the file in your editor: the one saved for that file kind, else the Default Editor set in Settings → Open & Edit, else the editor macOS registers for that type. If there is none, maXfolders asks you to choose one. Open With → Edit With… picks an editor for one file and asks whether to keep it for that file kind, for all files, or just once; Always Edit With… saves it for that file kind straight away. Settings → Open & Edit lists every saved editor and Open With application by file kind, to add or remove them. New in 1.6.66.

Control-click files or folders and choose Copy Path (Copy N Paths for several, one per line) to put their full paths on the clipboard. Control-click empty space in a pane to copy the path of the folder it shows. Items inside an archive copy their path through the archive, and items on a server their ftp:// address (sftp:// PRO).

Compare Files (⌃D) compares one Source file with a file in Destination. After you start it, click a file in Destination, then Compare or Return. Choose… picks a file that is not listed.

Get Info PRO

Control-click one or more files or folders and choose Get Info to open the real Finder Get Info window for them — the same window Finder itself shows. Not available inside an archive or on a remote (FTP/SFTP) pane, since it needs a real file on disk, or in the App Store edition, which doesn't request the Automation entitlement this needs — get maXfolders Pro. New in 1.6.20.

Media Info

Get Media Info… (⌃I, or right-click a video/audio file) opens a window with that file's technical details: container format, duration, and title in General, then codec, resolution, aspect ratio, frame rate, and bit rate for each Video track, and codec, sample rate, channels, and bit depth for each Audio track (plus a Text section for subtitle tracks). Save as Text…, Save as JSON…, and Save as XML… export the report. Available in every edition, free included.

Select several audio or video files and Get Media Info shows one table with each file's container, duration, codecs, resolution, frame rate and channels. With Apple Intelligence, Summarise says what the files have in common and which ones differ — a 23.976 fps clip among 25 fps ones, a file without an audio track — and the counts are maXfolders' own.

Contact Sheet

Make Contact Sheet… (Tools menu, or Control-click photos, videos, or a folder of them → Tools) lays them out as a PDF grid of thumbnails with their names — the proof sheet photographers send to clients. With nothing selected it takes every photo and video in the folder. Choose the title and subtitle, page size and orientation, columns, frame numbers, file names, a line with the date taken and pixel size (a video's length), and a dark background, with a live preview of every page. Save PDF… writes it wherever you like, next to the photos by default. Thumbnails come from Quick Look, so RAW photos and videos work too, and names in the PDF are real text you can search.

Media Show

Media Show… (⌃⇧M, Tools menu, or Control-click photos, videos, audio, or a folder of them → Tools) opens a window for flipping through them: a dark stage, a filmstrip of thumbnails along the bottom, and an info panel on the right. With nothing selected it shows everything in the folder; select one file to start at it, several to see just those, or a folder to see what's inside. Pinch or use the − / + pill to zoom a photo, double-click to jump between fit and 100%, and drag to pan. Videos and audio play with the standard controls. Press Space to play or pause, ← and → to move on, and I to show or hide the info panel. The info panel lists each file's details — camera, exposure and location for a photo; format, tracks and bit rate for a video or audio file (with the full track-by-track breakdown in Pro). The tray button puts the current item on the Shelf, or takes it off again if it's already there; Control-click any thumbnail to add or remove it, or choose Add All to Shelf.

Folder analysis

Folder analysis… breaks down where the space in a folder goes. Control-click a folder and choose Folder analysis…, just below Delete…, or Control-click empty space in a pane to analyze the folder the pane shows. The root of a network share or another mount that isn’t a disk shows Mount analysis… instead; a folder on an external drive is still Folder analysis…. The breakdown is a sunburst of file and folder sizes: the folder is the center, each ring is the level below it, and the wider a wedge the more space it takes. Scan This Pane's folder, your Home Folder or any folder you choose; a count of files and bytes runs while it reads. Click a wedge to select it, double-click a folder to zoom in, and click the centre, press ⌘↑ or choose Back or Whole Scan to climb out again. The side list switches between In This Folder and Largest Files, and Color by Folder or Color by Kind paints the graph either way. The size presets — Show All, Medium+ (100 MB and up), Large (1 GB and up), Very Large (5 GB and up) and Custom, with its own size, date and name limits — and a switch for each kind of file (Pictures, Videos, Audio, Documents, Archives & Disk Images, Applications, Developer, Caches, Logs & Trash and Other; Option-click one to see only that kind) narrow what's shown. Cleaning up is optional: Reveal in Finder, Add to Shelf and Move to Trash… act on the selection, and nothing is moved until you choose one. Move to Trash asks first and says how much space it frees, and what it trashes can still be put back from the Trash.

Clicking the graph reveals the matching list row, or its containing folder for a nested item. If the item is absent from the list, Show in List changes the list context when you choose it. Your exact selection and filters are preserved; file details load in the background.

In Folder analysis, the Custom filter has a describe field — “videos over 1 GB I haven't touched in a year” — that Apple Intelligence turns into size, date and name limits you can still edit. Suggest What to Clean looks over the biggest files and selects the ones that look safe to delete, and Is it safe to delete? gives the selected files a verdict — Safe to delete, Probably safe, Check first or Keep — with a reason. Explain This Scan describes the whole graph in view at once — groups such as old Xcode archives or simulator caches, each with its real size and a verdict — and choosing a group selects its items. It reads only paths, sizes, kinds and ages, never what's inside a file, and it is a second opinion: you decide. Apple Intelligence

PRO Disk analysis: Control-click a disk — the root of a disk on this Mac, such as Macintosh HD — for the same window on the whole disk. Choose Disk or Folder lists every mounted disk with its free space, files under 1 MB are grouped as “smaller files” so a disk scans quickly, and folders maXfolders can't read are counted and listed, with a Grant Full Disk Access… button to include them. In the Mac App Store edition a disk’s root is analyzed as a folder, with Folder analysis….

Sort Into Folders

Sort Into Folders… (Tools menu, or Control-click a folder → Tools) tidies a messy folder such as Downloads or Desktop. Apple Intelligence, on your Mac, reads the names, kinds and ages of the loose files in the folder (never what is inside them) and proposes folders for them. The plan opens as a tree you can edit: rename a folder, drag files between folders or choose Move to… on a file, untick a file or folder to leave it where it is, add a folder, or Regenerate for a fresh proposal. A folder that already exists is reused when the name matches, a file whose name is taken is numbered rather than replaced, and sub-folders, hidden files and downloads still arriving are left alone. Nothing moves until you press Sort. The whole run is one operation: Undo in the window or the Transfers window (or ⌥⌘Z) puts every file back and removes the folders it made — in every edition. Apple Intelligence

In the Sort Into Folders plan, select several files with Shift-click or Command-click and drag them together, drop files on the empty area at the bottom to start a new folder, and read the size bars to see where the space is going.

Quick Edit

Quick Edit… (⌥⌘E, Tools menu, or Control-click a text file → Quick Edit…) opens a small editor in a window of its own for fixing a text or code file and getting out. Open as many files as you like at once: the main window stays usable, and clicking the Dock icon brings every editor forward. It colours more than 45 languages and formats, including Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, C#, SQL, Swift, Java, Kotlin, C and C++, Go, Rust, PHP, shell and PowerShell scripts, Dockerfile, Makefile, TOML, JSON, YAML, HTML, XML, CSS, Markdown, CSV, diff, iCalendar and log files, and keeps the file's own tabs or spaces. Markdown, HTML, SVG and CSV files have a Preview switch; Markdown also has a Split view and formatting buttons (⌘B bold, ⌘I italic, ⇧⌘K link). The slider sets the text size, and the status bar changes the language, indentation, line endings and encoding: Reopen with Encoding re-reads the file when accents or Greek letters look garbled, and Save with Encoding converts it when you save. The Changes view compares your edits with the file on disk or an earlier version. The curly-brace menu checks JSON, XML, property lists, iCalendar, vCard and .strings files for problems and neatly lays out JSON, XML and property lists; binary property lists open as XML and are saved back as binary. Line numbers, bracket matching and automatic closing of brackets and quotes can be switched off in Settings → Open & Edit. Save writes the file and closes, with Keep previous version ticked by default so the old text goes into Version History; Save a Copy… writes a new file and leaves the original alone; Cancel closes, asking first if you have unsaved changes. Files over 5 MB open in the Large File Viewer instead, and files that are not text are refused. On a Mac with Apple Intelligence, the system Writing Tools (proofread, rewrite, summary) work inside the text, and the sparkle menu can explain, fix, comment or summarize the selection on this Mac, showing the result before anything changes. Settings → Open & Edit can make Edit (F4) open Quick Edit.

Save as Administrator lets Quick Edit change files that belong to the system — PRO. Open /etc/hosts, a file in /etc/sudoers.d, or a property list in /Library/LaunchDaemons and the editor stays editable, marked with a lock; Save becomes Save as Administrator…, and macOS asks for your administrator password (or Touch ID) before the file is replaced. A file you can't even read, like /etc/sudoers, is offered as Open as Administrator… instead of failing. Before anything is written, sudoers files are checked with visudo and property lists with plutil, so a typo can't lock you out of sudo or break a daemon: a file with a problem is refused and the original stays untouched. The file keeps its owner and permissions, the old contents go to Privileged Backups in the maXfolders folder of Application Support, and a saved hosts file flushes the DNS cache. Files that macOS protects, and files on a read-only disk, can't be changed even by an administrator.

Validate on Save checks a configuration file before Quick Edit writes it, in every edition, and warns before a change that could lock you out. Property lists, and launchd jobs in LaunchDaemons and LaunchAgents, go through plutil, and a launchd job must have its Label and a ProgramArguments or Program; sudoers files go through visudo; sshd_config goes through sshd -t; nginx.conf goes through nginx -t when nginx is installed; crontabs and systemd .service, .timer and .socket units are checked by maXfolders itself (five time fields, a command, ExecStart and the other required keys). Where a system tool can't run, such as inside the App Store edition's sandbox, maXfolders' own checker does the same job. A file with a problem stops the save and lists its lines under Show Problems; Save Anyway is offered, except for a sudoers file that the system's own check rejects. A valid change that would still lock you out, such as turning off every SSH login method, an AllowUsers list without your account, a sudoers file with no rule for you, or sshd listening only on this Mac, asks first, with Keep Editing as the default button. When you don't have permission to change a file, a banner above the editor says why (the file belongs to the system, the disk is read-only, macOS protects it, or this edition hasn't been given access to the folder) and what to do next, such as Save a Copy. The switch is in Settings → Open & Edit.

Permissions and owner bar: Quick Edit shows the open file's permissions, owner and group in a bar under the title, such as 0644 rw-r--r-- root:wheel. Click it to change them with Read, Write and Execute checkboxes for the owner, the group and everyone, an octal field with presets, and a menu of the groups you belong to. The change is applied when you save; until then the bar shows it as 0644 → 0600 with a Revert button. A file you own but can't write, such as a read-only 0444 file, can be made writable this way and then edited. Before a save changes the owner, group or permissions, Quick Edit lists what will change and asks first, with Cancel as the default button: a change you asked for, taking away your own write access, making a file writable by everyone, setting setuid or setgid, and a save that would otherwise make you the owner of a file that belongs to someone else. For that last case, Save in Place overwrites the file itself so its owner and group stay. Changing the owner, or the permissions of a file that belongs to another user, is part of maXfolders Pro and goes through the macOS administrator prompt; the App Store edition changes the permissions and group of your own files. The bar can be switched off in Settings → Open & Edit.

Hex view: the Hex button next to Edit, Preview and Changes in Quick Edit shows the file's bytes as an offset, hex and ASCII. A file Quick Edit can't read as text, such as a certificate (.cer, .der), opens straight in the Hex view, and a binary property list shows its real bytes rather than the XML you edit. You can edit the bytes in place: click a byte, type hex digits (or characters in the ASCII column), Tab switches columns, Delete zeroes a byte, ⌘Z and ⇧⌘Z undo and redo, and Save writes only the changed bytes; the file never changes size. Edited bytes are tinted, a bar counts them and offers Revert Bytes, and the other views are locked until you save or revert. Before saving, maXfolders warns if the edit leaves something that may not open, such as a damaged certificate, a property list that no longer parses, a PNG with a wrong checksum, or a text file that is no longer text; Save a Copy keeps the original untouched, and the previous version is kept in Version History. For certificates (DER and PEM), binary property lists and PNG images a Structure panel shows the file's parts with their byte ranges: choose one to select its bytes, and Explain Apple Intelligence (on this Mac, from the parsed structure only) says in plain language what the selected part is. Search by bytes (de ad be ef or 0xDEADBEEF) or switch the search to Text; ⌘G or Return jumps to the next match, ⇧Return to the previous one, and Go to offset takes 0x1f0 or 496. Choose 8, 16 or 32 bytes per row, and Control-click a row to copy its hex, ASCII or offset.

Certificate and PEM decoding: open a .pem, .crt, .cer or .der file in Quick Edit and choose Preview to see who a certificate was issued to (the subject), who issued it, when it is valid and whether it has expired, with its serial number, signature, public key, alternative names, key usage and SHA-256 and SHA-1 fingerprints. A file with several certificates, such as a CA bundle, shows each one, and a certificate request is decoded too; private keys are recognized but never decoded or shown. Preview follows what you type, Split shows it beside the text, and a binary certificate (.cer, .der) offers Preview next to Hex. Format re-wraps PEM text at 64 characters and tidies the Base64, keeping any text between the certificates. Check for Problems reports a certificate that has expired, is not valid yet or expires within 30 days, a weak signature (SHA-1 or MD5), an RSA key under 2048 bits, a certificate listed twice, and PEM blocks that are damaged. Everything is decoded on your Mac.

Secret masking: Quick Edit underlines likely secrets as you read a file: private keys, API tokens (GitHub, AWS, Slack, Stripe, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, npm and SendGrid), JSON Web Tokens, Authorization headers, passwords inside URLs, and values assigned to names such as password, secret, token or api_key in .env, JSON, YAML, INI and shell files. Placeholders such as ${DB_PASSWORD}, <your key> and empty values are left alone. The key button in the toolbar offers Copy with Secrets Masked, which copies the selection (or the whole file) with every secret replaced by [REDACTED] so you can paste it into a ticket or a chat; the same command is in the right-click menu. It also has Next Secret, Show Secrets (lists them by kind and line, never the value) and Mask Secrets in Editor, which replaces them in the text as one edit you can undo with ⌘Z before saving. Matching is by pattern, so a secret with an unusual shape may not be found: read the text before you share it. Everything is checked on your Mac. The underline can be switched off in Settings → Open & Edit.

Snippets and decoder: Quick Edit inserts snippets and decodes or encodes the selected text in place. The snippet button in the toolbar (⌥⌘J) opens a list: type to filter, ↑ ↓ to choose and Return to insert it over the selection. A snippet can hold blanks to fill in: $1 or ${1:default} are places you move between with Tab (⇧Tab goes back, Esc stops, and a place that appears twice takes on what you typed when you press Tab), $0 is where the cursor ends, and $SELECTION, $CLIPBOARD, $FILENAME, $FILEBASE, $DATE, $TIME, $YEAR and $UUID are filled in for you. Lines after the first keep the indentation of the line the snippet goes on. A few snippets come with the app; New… saves your own, starting from the selected text, and they are kept in snippets.json next to your settings. The Decode button reads a JWT, Base64, URL-safe Base64, URL percent-encoding, HTML entities, Unicode escapes (\uXXXX) and hex bytes. Decode Selection (⌥⌘U) works out which it is, Decode as and Encode as choose one, and each is one edit you can undo. A JWT decodes to its header and payload as JSON (the signature is dropped and never checked), and Inspect JWT… shows the issuer, subject and audience, when it was issued and expires, and whether it has expired, without changing the file. Text that decodes to binary data is left as it is, and in a read-only file Copy Decoded Selection puts the result on the clipboard instead. Hover a Unix timestamp such as 1700000000 (seconds) or 1700000000123 (milliseconds) to see it as a date in UTC and in your time zone, and how long ago it was; Settings → Open & Edit turns this off.

Colour swatches: Quick Edit draws a small swatch after a colour so you can see it. It recognizes #f80 and #ff8800 (with or without transparency), rgb(), rgba(), hsl() and hsla(), CSS colour names such as orange or rebeccapurple, and SwiftUI colours such as Color.orange, .red and Color(red: 1, green: 0.5, blue: 0). Click a swatch, or press ⌥⌘K with the cursor in a colour, to change it with the system colour panel. The text changes as you drag, keeps the way the colour was written (a hex colour stays hex, rgb(255 136 0) keeps its spaces), and the whole change is one edit you can undo. A colour name becomes a hex colour unless the new colour is another name. Short forms such as #fff are only read as colours in web and data files, and a word such as orange only in CSS or as the value of a key called colour, fill or background, so ordinary text is left alone. In a read-only file the swatches are shown but can't be changed. Settings → Open & Edit turns the swatches off.

JSON, YAML and TOML tools: for JSON, YAML and TOML files Quick Edit adds a Data button to the toolbar. Query… opens a bar where you type a path in JSONPath ($.store.book[?(@.price < 10)].title) or jq (.store.book[] | select(.price < 10) | .title) spelling; the matches appear below it as JSON, and you can copy them or replace the text with them. Sort Keys puts object keys in alphabetical order, in the whole file or at the top level only. Convert in Editor rewrites the text as JSON, YAML or TOML (Save a Copy writes it under the new name), and Copy as puts the converted text on the clipboard without touching the file. Preview and Split show the file as a collapsible tree with the type of each value and the number of items under it. Check for Problems now reads YAML and TOML as well. Sorting and converting drop comments (the editor says so) and can be undone with ⌘Z. YAML support covers everyday files: anchors and aliases, tags and files with several documents are reported instead of guessed at. TOML cannot hold null, so a conversion that would need one stops and says where. The query language is a subset of JSONPath and jq, not all of jq. Everything happens on your Mac.

Multiple cursors, folding and Go to Symbol: Quick Edit can type in several places at once. Press ⌘D to select the word at the cursor, then press it again to add the next match each time; ⌥-drag selects a column of text with a cursor on every line, and ⌥-click adds a single cursor. Typing, Return, Tab, Delete and the arrow keys then act on every cursor, ⌘Z undoes them together, and Esc goes back to one cursor. Select All Occurrences, in the Editing tools menu (the text cursor button), selects every match at once. ⌥⌘↑ and ⌥⌘↓ add a cursor on the line above or below, in the same column. Copy and Cut take every selection, one per line, and pasting text that has as many lines as there are cursors puts one line on each cursor. Code folding hides a block's lines without changing the file: click the arrow beside a line number, or press ⌥⌘[ and ⌥⌘], to fold or unfold the block at the cursor; Fold All and Unfold All are in the same menu. Blocks come from braces and brackets, indentation (Python, YAML and similar), Markdown headings and fenced code, and INI or TOML sections. A folded block shows ⋯ after its first line, and searching or jumping into it opens it again. ⌘L opens Go to Line, where 120, 120:8, +10 and -10 all work, and ⇧⌘O lists the functions, classes, headings and sections of the file, found by the same scan that colours the text; type a few letters and press Return to jump. The Lines submenu of the Editing tools menu works on the selected lines, or on the whole file when nothing is selected: sort (A to Z, Z to A, ignoring case, or by the first number in each line), remove duplicate or blank lines, reverse, trim whitespace, change case, join lines, wrap long lines at 60 to 120 columns and unwrap paragraphs; each is one undoable edit. Folding can be switched off in Settings → Open & Edit.

Explain Log Apple Intelligence: for a .log file, or text whose lines start with a time, the Apple Intelligence menu in Quick Edit has Explain Log…, and the Large File Viewer has the same button, so a log of any size can be read. It groups the warnings and errors by message (with the numbers and ids taken out), with how often each happened, when, and the line where it first appears; click a group to go to that line. Ask a question such as “what failed around 14:00?” or “errors in the last hour” and only that time is read. Explain then says what went wrong, citing the groups as C1, C2, from those counts; a sentence with a number that isn't in the log is left out. A large log goes to Private Cloud Compute when Settings allows it. It reads the saved file.

Copy and move

Copy (F5 or ⌃C) and Move (F6 or ⌃M) queue the Source selection as a job in the Transfers window rather than blocking the app. Choose how it should handle a name that already exists at the destination — Overwrite All, Skip Existing, or Overwrite If Newer — before it runs. The toolbar icons point toward Destination and flip when Source changes. Copy into a ZIP adds those items. Copy into tar / tgz / tbz is refused. New in 1.6.22.

Transfers

Every copy, move, and delete queues as a job in the Transfers window (View → Show Transfers) — pause, resume, cancel, retry, or drag to reorder any job, or pause/resume the whole queue at once. Jobs persist across a relaunch and carry on where they stopped, unless you paused them. When there are unfinished jobs, the Transfers window opens at launch. New in 1.6.55. A dropped connection pauses the affected job instead of failing files one by one, and resumes automatically once the network is back. FTP transfers resume from where they stopped after an interruption instead of restarting in both editions; SFTP, S3, and Dropbox do the same, and WebDAV downloads resume the same way (uploads restart) — all PRO. New in 1.6.22. S3, Dropbox, and WebDAV transfers are also checksum-verified after completion, catching a corrupted upload or download instead of trusting it silently — PRO; a mismatch is retried like any other failed file. A per-connection Verify checksums after transfer setting (default on) controls this from Add/Edit Cloud Provider. New in 1.6.25.

Each job in the Transfers window shows what it changed — “old.txt → new.txt”, or the first change and how many more — and where: the folder it worked in, or the folders it copied or moved between. Click the arrow beside it to list every change; an item that failed is marked. Before Undo reverses a job, it lists those changes and says what Undo will do, such as putting files back from the Trash. Tick Always undo without asking to skip that question, or turn it back on in Settings → General.

Undo Last Operation (Edit → Undo Last Operation, ⌥⌘Z, or the Undo button on a job in the Transfers window) reverses a completed Copy, Move, Delete, or Bulk operation — deleting what a Copy created, moving a Move back, restoring a Delete from Trash, swapping a Bulk Rename's names back, or removing what a Bulk Convert wrote and bringing back any originals or replaced files it sent to the Trash — PRO. Local only; a plain Move is undoable only when everything came from one source folder, a job that's already been undone (or is itself an undo) can't be undone again, and a job stays eligible for 30 days. Before a destructive local job runs, maXfolders also takes a background local APFS snapshot; if later changes mean Undo would no longer replay correctly, the clock-arrow button next to Undo restores just that job's files from the pre-job snapshot instead, without reverting the rest of the volume — PRO.

Drag and drop from Finder

Drag files or folders from Finder onto a pane to copy or move them into that folder. After the drop, choose Copy, Move, or Cancel. Drops into a ZIP work; drops onto tar or a read-only volume are refused.

Copy, Cut and Paste files

Press ⌘C (Edit → Copy) in a pane to put the selected files and folders on the clipboard as real files, or ⌘X (Edit → Cut) to mark them to be moved — cut rows are dimmed until they are pasted. Control-click a row and choose Copy or Cut for the same. Then press ⌘V in a pane, in Finder, or in Mail, Slack, Terminal and other apps.

In a maXfolders pane, files copied or cut here are pasted at once: a copy stays where it was, a cut moves. Files copied in Finder or another app still ask Copy or Move, as a drop does. Move Item Here (Edit → Move Item Here, ⌥⌘V) always moves without asking, so ⌘C then ⌥⌘V moves files either way between maXfolders and Finder. In Finder, ⌘V copies and ⌥⌘V moves what you copied in maXfolders — Finder decides that, so it never asks Copy or Move there.

Paste into the folder the files already live in, or choose Duplicate (Actions → Duplicate, ⌘D), to make a copy named “report copy.pdf”, then “report copy 2.pdf”. Control-click a folder and choose Paste Into to put the files inside it. Rows in an FTP, SFTP or cloud pane can be copied or cut and pasted into another maXfolders pane, but not into Finder. Copy as Pathname (Edit → Copy as Pathname, ⌥⌘C) copies each selected item’s full path as text, and ⌘⌫ moves the selection to the Trash, as in Finder.

Paste as File

Press ⌘V (Edit → Paste) in a pane, or Control-click it and choose Paste, to turn whatever is on the clipboard into a file in that folder. An image becomes a PNG, a copied link a .webloc that opens it, and text a .txt file — or a .md file when it's Markdown (headings, lists, links, code). The new file is selected with its name ready to edit, and never replaces an existing one (Pasted Image 2.png, …). Files copied in Finder are copied in instead, asking Copy or Move as a drop does. Works in folders on this Mac, not inside archives or on remote connections.

Create Archive… (F9 or ⌃A) creates a ZIP from the Source selection — or a 7-Zip archive, PRO. Extract Archive (F10 or ⌃U) unpacks selected zip/tar files — plus 7z and RAR, PRO — into a folder you choose. It suggests a new folder named after each archive, next to it (Photos.zip → Photos, Backup.tar.gz → Backup), so the contents never mix with the files already there. Type or paste another path, or click Browse… to pick one or make a New Folder; missing folders are created when you click Extract, and Cancel writes nothing. Several archives each get their own folder. Extracting into a folder that already has files asks first, and same-name files are never replaced without asking.

Save file list

Save File List (⌃S) writes a CSV next to the selected folder (or the current Source folder). Named wildcards, content search, and Advanced filters match Find.

New folder, rename, delete

New Folder creates in the pane you click, or in Source via F7 / ⇧⌘N / ⌃K.

Delete (F8, ⌃X, or forward Delete) always asks first, then moves to Trash — or removes an entry inside a ZIP. Rename (F2 or ⌃N) edits the focused name in the list. Click the name of a selected file or folder to rename it the same way, like Finder. Return saves; Esc cancels.

Permissions

Control-click a file or folder, or Tools → Inspect & Edit → Permissions…, opens a popup with owner/group/other read, write, and execute checkboxes and an octal field, kept in sync. Works on a multi-selection; if the selection includes a folder, an Apply to enclosed items checkbox also changes everything inside it. Not available inside an archive or on a remote pane. New in 1.6.13.

Tags

A Tags column shows each item's Finder tags as a colored dot and name per tag, off by default like Kind and Permissions — turn it on from the column header menu. Control-click one or more files or folders for a Tags submenu: click any of the 7 standard colors, or an existing custom tag, to toggle it across the whole selection (checked when every selected item already has it, same as Finder), plus Add Tag… for a custom name and Remove All Tags. Custom tags show as a plain gray dot, since their true color lives in Finder's private tag registry. An item with a color also shows it on its icon, up to three colors at once, and a color change updates the row straight away (new in 1.6.72). Not available inside an archive or on a remote pane. New in 1.6.19.

Comments PRO

A Comments column shows each item's Finder comment, off by default like Kind and Permissions — turn it on from the column header menu. Control-click one or more files or folders for a Comment submenu: Set Comment… applies one across the whole selection, Clear Comment removes it. Not available inside an archive or on a remote (FTP/SFTP) pane, or in the App Store edition — it uses the same Finder Automation entitlement as Get Info. New in 1.6.26.

Type letters in a pane to jump to a name. Commands use Control so every letter stays free for that.

A pane's selection can also be dragged out, not just dropped onto: to the other pane (reaches the same Copy or Move prompt), onto the Shelf, or out to Finder. Dropping on Finder asks Copy, Move, or Cancel. Copy keeps the originals. Move removes them after they land in the Finder folder. Dropping on another app copies.

The Shelf collects files from anywhere — either pane, Finder, or another app — before copying or moving them all at once. It sits docked on the right of the main window, beside one pane or both. Show or hide it with the tray button on the window's right edge, the toolbar Shelf button, ⌃J, or View → Show Shelf / Hide Shelf. The button at the top of the Shelf (or View → Detach Shelf) opens it in its own floating window, which stays on top and usable even when maXfolders isn't the frontmost app; the same button there (or View → Dock Shelf in Main Window) puts it back. Drag the docked Shelf's left edge to make it wider or narrower, or double-click the edge for the default width. Staged items stay put when you hide, detach or dock it, and the Shelf reopens the way you left it at launch.

Settings → General → Shelf appears in chooses where the Shelf lives: Main window (the default), Floating window, or Menu bar. In the menu bar the Shelf is a tray icon — filled while something is staged — that opens the Shelf below it. Drop files straight onto the icon to stage them, click it to open the Shelf and click it again to close it; it stays open in between, so you can drag more in from Finder. ⌃J and View → Show Shelf / Hide Shelf open and close it in any style.

Each staged item shows its name, its size and where it is. A file that has since been moved or deleted is marked Not available anymore, and Remove Missing clears them all. The Preview button on an item looks inside it, and Control-click → Move to Trash trashes the real file; Delete All trashes every staged file after asking. Both delete the files themselves, not just the Shelf entries, and the Trash keeps them until you empty it. In Find, Add to Shelf stages the selected result or every item found.

Add items by dragging them onto the panel, dragging a pane's selection onto it, or Control-click → Add to Shelf. Each staged item shows its name and path; the × next to one removes just that item, and Clear empties the whole Shelf.

Copy and Move send every staged item to the folder shown under the buttons. When the two panes are in different folders, Source and Destination choose which one receives them, without flipping which pane is active. Control-click a pane and choose Copy Shelf Here or Move Shelf Here to send the Shelf straight into that folder. Move clears the Shelf afterward; Copy leaves the staged items in place for reuse. Actions → Add to Shelf stages the Source selection and opens the panel. The panel follows your chosen color theme, the same as every other window.

The macOS Share menu also has a Send to maXfolders Shelf entry — share a file from Finder, Photos, Mail, or any app that supports Share, and it's staged on the Shelf the next time you open maXfolders. New in 1.6.48.

Control-click → Add to Shelf now also works on a remote pane — FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, S3, or Dropbox, and iCloud Photos PRO. Copy/Move from the Shelf queues a background job for any staged remote item, the same as an ordinary remote Copy/Move, rather than the per-file overwrite prompt local items get. New in 1.6.49. A remote row can also be dragged straight onto the Shelf panel now, the same as a local one. New in 1.6.50.

Danger-Zone Guards block a Delete or Move that's almost certainly a mistake: your home folder, core system directories (/, /System, /Library, /usr, /bin, /sbin, /private, /Applications), and the root of a network-mounted share. These are hard blocks with no in-dialog override — Copy is never affected, since it never removes or renames anything at the source.

Settings → Danger Zone lets you mark your own protected folders — a soft block you can remove there when you actually need to delete or move one. A bulk operation affecting 500 or more items also gets an extra confirmation dialog before it runs, on top of the usual one. New in 1.6.48.

Before a copy or move starts, Preflight walks everything about to be sent and checks it against the destination, so you find out what won't survive the trip before it happens rather than afterwards. It covers Copy and Move, drag between panes, Finder drops, Bulk Copy/Move, Copy Template, Compare's copy, and the Shelf, in both editions.

It checks free space (and what's left afterwards), files that already exist, names that differ only in case on exFAT, FAT, NTFS, SMB or Dropbox, characters and names Windows can't open (colons, trailing dots or spaces, CON, LPT1…), name and path lengths measured at the destination (including Windows' 260-character limit from the drive root), files of 4 GB or more headed for FAT32, Finder tags, comments and resource forks the destination can't carry, locked, unreadable or in-use files, and symbolic links that loop or point nowhere. For an upload to a remote server it also flags decomposed (NFD) Unicode names, which Linux and Windows show mangled; Normalise names uploads them composed (NFC) instead.

By default Preflight only stops you when it finds something. A clean check goes straight on, and the status bar shows the totals. The panel lets you filter findings by check, change what happens to files that already exist, and choose Cancel or Copy Anyway. Settings → General → Preflight before copy or move can show it every time or turn it off. Copies onto APFS or Mac OS Extended now keep Finder tags and other extended attributes too. New in 1.6.55.

With Apple Intelligence, Summarise Issues in the panel explains the report in a few sentences — what will fail or change on this destination, why, and what to do — with a line for each kind of problem. The counts and the destination's rules come from Preflight itself; a sentence stating a number Preflight didn't find is dropped.

Sidecar awareness keeps files that belong together together — PRO. When something you copy or move has companion files beside it, Preflight lists them, ticked, before anything starts, instead of quietly adding them to the selection: a video's subtitle, chapter and thumbnail files (.srt, .vtt, .thm, .aae), a photo's metadata sidecar (.xmp, .pp3, .dop, .on1), the other half of a RAW+JPEG pair (.cr3 or .arw with .jpg), a Sketch or Final Cut project's asset folder, and a download's .download or checksum file. Untick any you want to leave behind. Companions share the file's name — clip_01.srt, IMG_0001.CR3.xmp and clip_01.en.srt all count. Settings → Sidecars edits the pairings or adds your own extension groups, and chooses whether companions are offered, always included, or ignored.

Control-click a folder, open Bulk and choose Bulk Delete…, Bulk Rename…, Bulk Copy…, Bulk Move…, or Bulk Convert… to open a dedicated window that walks the whole folder tree (or, for an iCloud Photos connection, its albums) and shows exactly which items match before anything happens. Local folders and plain FTP connections get the same filters as Find — name wildcards, size, date, attributes, and content search; SFTP, S3, WebDAV, and Dropbox connections get simple name wildcards instead. An iCloud Photos connection gets its own criteria instead — album, media type, favorites, screenshots, date range or "older than", and size — PRO. Bulk Delete, Bulk Copy, and Bulk Move all work on iCloud Photos; Bulk Rename does not, since a Photos asset has no name of its own to rename.

Dry Run scans and fills the table without touching anything; review it, then Run… to actually delete, rename, copy, or move. Bulk Copy and Bulk Move also ask for a Destination path and how to handle name collisions there. Bulk Rename combines any number of rules — find/replace (text or regex), uppercase/lowercase/Title Case, add a prefix or suffix, sequential numbering with a custom start value and padding, replacing the extension, setting a new name, and inserting file info (Date Taken, date modified or created, camera, lens, or dimensions) before, after, or instead of the name — with a live preview of every New Name and a warning on any name collision that blocks Run until it's resolved. Sequential numbers follow the names in Finder order.

With Apple Intelligence (macOS 26 or later), describe the new names above the rules — natural-language Bulk Rename — such as date taken, then camera, then a 3-digit counter, and Fill In turns it into rules, with the live preview showing every New Name. Nothing is renamed until you click Run…, and Undo Fill brings your previous rules back. Clear Form, next to Dry Run in every Bulk window, resets the filters, rename rules and destination, and drops the dry run.

With Sidecar awareness, Bulk Rename renames companion files to match, so renaming clip_01.mov to Intro.mov takes clip_01.srt to Intro.srt — even when the filter matched only the videos — and a RAW, its JPEG and its XMP share one sequence number instead of getting three — PRO. Companion rows are listed in the preview and undone with the rest of the job. Renaming a single file with F2 offers to rename its companions too.

If the window ends up behind the main window, choose the same Bulk command on the same folder again — or pick it from the Window menu — to bring it back with its dry run and settings as you left them. A different Bulk command or folder starts a new one.

Every kind queues through the same engine as the Transfers window, so it can pause, resume, and survive an app relaunch mid-run just like a plain copy or move. Local deletes go to Trash; deleting on a remote connection (including iCloud Photos PRO, which has no Trash of its own) is permanent and asks for confirmation first. Bulk Copy and Bulk Move from iCloud Photos export the matched media, and Move removes the originals afterward in one batched Photos-library change — a single system confirmation for the whole job instead of one per photo. New in 1.6.30; Bulk Copy, Bulk Move, and iCloud Photos support added in 1.6.47.

Bulk Convert

Bulk Convert… (local folders) turns every matched file into something else, using only macOS's own frameworks. Images: HEIC to JPEG, PNG, HEIC or TIFF (or re-compress in the same format), resized by long edge, percentage, or a target file size, keeping all metadata, removing just the location (GPS and IPTC place names), or removing it all — orientation is applied to the pixels, so photos stay upright either way. PDF: merge every match into one file, in the Source pane's sort order; split into single pages or every N pages; or rotate every page. Video: remux into MP4, MOV or M4V with the streams copied untouched — no re-encoding, so it's near-instant — optionally trimmed (a trim starts on the nearest key frame). Audio: AAC or Apple Lossless (.m4a), or WAV, from any audio file or a movie's soundtrack.

Converted files go next to their originals or into a folder you choose (keeping their subfolders), with an optional name suffix. If a file with the output's name already exists, Keep Both saves “name 2”, Skip leaves it, and Replace moves it to the Trash first. Move originals to Trash retires each source once it has converted, and also allows converting in place. The dry run skips files the conversion can't read, and blocks Run when an output would overwrite its own original or another file in the same run. New in 1.6.56.

With Apple Intelligence (macOS 26 or later), the Describe field above the settings takes the whole job in your own words — merge them into one PDF called “Northwind Contracts 2026” (put the file name in quotes), make these web-ready: 2000px long edge, strip GPS, JPEG 80% — and Fill In picks the operation and sets the format, size, quality, metadata, suffix or merged file name. What you stated is set exactly; anything vague is marked suggested, and Undo Fill puts the settings back. Do… (⇧⌘P) can open Bulk Rename or Bulk Convert on the Source folder already filled in the same way.

Copy Template… (Tools menu, or Control-click → Tools) copies the Source selection while skipping files and folders you exclude — by exact name (e.g. .git) or wildcard pattern (e.g. *.log; *.tmp), separated by semicolons.

Exclusion rules save as named, reusable templates — build one once from Manage Templates… and reuse it on future copies instead of retyping the rules. Dry Run walks the selection and previews exactly which files and folders will be copied versus excluded, without touching anything; an excluded folder is shown but not opened, since nothing inside it will be copied either. Works the same way copying into or out of a ZIP or TAR archive.

Apply queues the reviewed copy as a job in the Transfers window, same as a plain Copy — it pauses, resumes, and survives an app relaunch mid-run. Local folders only; a remote or cloud Source or Destination uses plain Copy instead. New in 1.6.39.

Shows text files side by side, including differences inside a line, or a hex view for binary files. Changed lines are amber, added lines green, removed lines red. Only differences hides matching lines. Previous / Next (⌘↑ / ⌘↓) jumps between differences. Esc closes the window.

Version History

Version History… (Tools menu, or Control-click a document → Tools) lists the earlier versions macOS kept of it, newest first, under the current file. Double-click a version (or Compare with Current) to open it against the file as it is now in File Comparator, older on the left; select two versions and Compare Selected to see what changed between them. Save a Copy writes a version out next to the document as “Name (version date).ext”, leaving the document itself untouched. macOS keeps these versions for documents saved by apps that use Auto Save — TextEdit, Preview, Pages, Numbers, Keynote and others.

Return or double-click on a zip, tar, tar.gz / tgz, or tar.bz2 / tbz file on disk enters it like a folder. The path bar shows the archive, then folders inside it. Backspace from the archive root goes to the folder that contains the archive file.

ZIP archives are writable: copy or move in, create folders, rename, and delete entries. Delete of a zip/tar file on disk still moves that file to Trash.

tar / tgz / tbz are extract-only. You can browse them and copy files out. Copy or move in, New Folder, Rename, or Delete inside them are refused.

Extract is unavailable while you are inside an archive; copy entries out instead. A zip or tar that exists only as an entry inside another archive stays a file.

The path bar shows an archive icon next to the pane badge whenever you are browsing inside a zip or tar file. New in 1.6.10.

PRO Create Archive also offers 7-Zip (.7z) as an output format, with full read/write support. RAR archives open, browse, and extract like any other — but can't be created, since RAR's compressor is proprietary. Both are not in the App Store edition — get maXfolders Pro.

Preview shows an archive's entry listing too: every file and folder inside it with its size and date, read without extracting anything. New in 1.6.48.

Two small system extensions install alongside maXfolders and work directly from Finder, without switching apps:

Open in maXfolders — a Finder toolbar item and right-click command on any selected file or folder that sends it straight to a new tab in maXfolders. Right-click → Add to Shelf, shown whenever something's selected, stages it on the Shelf directly from Finder — the same as dragging it onto the Shelf panel. New in 1.6.51.

Send to maXfolders Shelf — a macOS Share menu entry in Finder, Photos, Mail, and any app that supports Share; the shared file is staged on the Shelf for you to Copy or Move once you're back in maXfolders.

Both are enabled from System Settings → General → Login Items & Extensions the first time, same as any Finder extension, and work in both editions. New in 1.6.48.

maXfolders exposes Copy Files, Move Files, Create Archive, Extract Archive, and Find Files as actions in macOS's Shortcuts app — chain them with other apps' actions to build your own automations, or trigger them from Spotlight or Siri. Each action takes explicit files or folders as input (from a prior Shortcuts step, not whatever happens to be selected in maXfolders), so a shortcut runs the same way whether or not maXfolders is frontmost. New in 1.6.25.

The Theme menu combines Appearance and color theme. Appearance: System (follow macOS), or force Light or Dark.

Theme: Native uses system colors. Paper, Sand, and Ice are light. Midnight, Forest, Ember, Commander (a Norton Commander–style blue, yellow, and cyan look), Retro (bright green-phosphor text on near-black, for a vintage 80s terminal look, new in 1.6.23), and Xcode (Apple's own Default (Dark) Xcode colors, new in 1.6.18) are dark. Choosing a light or dark theme also switches Appearance to match. Folder-list text size is independent of theme.

macOS mounts Windows NTFS disks read-only. A pane on such a disk shows a Read-only badge. Copy from that disk still works. Copy onto it, move, new folder, rename, and delete need a writable remount.

Hasleo NTFS for Mac can remount the disk so every app can write. If macOS already mounted the disk, Eject then Mount from the Hasleo menu. Having Hasleo running is not enough while the system mount stays read-only.

Also add maXfolders, Hasleo NTFS for Mac, and HasleoNTFS4MacService in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access.

Free, trial and unlock: maXfolders is free to use. Everything is included for the first two months, and the footer counts the days. When they end, the free features stay — browsing, tabs, copy, move, rename, the Shelf, Find, Preview, Folder Compare, Sync Browsing and your saved connections — and Quick Edit, the bulk operations, Folder analysis, Sort Into Folders, Preflight, Copy Template, Version History, Contact Sheet, Media Show, FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, S3, Dropbox and the Apple Intelligence features ask you to unlock. Settings → License (or Unlock maXfolders… in the app menu) has the one-time purchase for this major version, which also includes a license for maXfolders Pro. Nothing you saved is removed in the meantime.

Last folders and folder tabs, favourites and whether the sidebar is shown, Open With choices, window positions, toolbar, list columns, text size, hidden-file visibility, file-list CSV options, which side is Source, theme, appearance, and each pane's embedded terminal PRO (shown or hidden, its height, and the shared text size) are saved to ~/Library/Application Support/maXfolders/settings.json.

A Settings window (⌘,) edits the display and window-layout parts of this directly, in three tabs — General (appearance, theme), File List (columns, text size), and Windows (Preview's remember-position toggle) — each with its own Reset to Defaults button, plus one button to reset all three at once. Favourites, saved connections, Open With choices, and open tabs are untouched by every reset. New in 1.6.19.

Folder access: maXfolders from the Mac App Store can open only the folders macOS lets it into. A folder outside them, such as Users or Shared, shows a lock and a Grant Access… button: click it and choose the folder (or a folder above it), and maXfolders can show it from then on, including after a restart. A folder you don't have permission to read shows the same lock without the button.

A locked folder also offers Go Back when the tab showed another folder before it, so you can return without typing a path. Going back never grants access; Grant Access… stays a separate choice.

Full Disk Access

Xcode debug builds do not appear automatically in System Settings. Use File → Install to Applications Folder…, then Full Disk Access, and add maXfolders from Applications.

Tools → Utilities opens nine small, self-contained utility windows that don't need a file from a pane for everyday developer tasks: Base64 Encoder/Decoder, URL Encoder/Decoder, HTML Text Encoder/Decoder, Image to Text (OCR), JSON Formatter (template, specification, and an optional auto-fix pass), XML Formatter (2/4-space, tab, or minified), Text Escape/Unescape (string-literal or HTML-entity), QR Code Encoder/Decoder, and a Cron Expression Parser.

Each window has its own Input and Output panels with Paste, Clear, and Copy. Image to Text uses Apple's on-device Vision framework to read text out of a dropped, browsed, or pasted image in a chosen or automatically detected language. JSON Formatter offers a JSON Template picker (2/3/4-space, tab, or minified output), a JSON Specification picker (RFC 8259, RFC 7159, and ECMA-404 accept any top-level value; RFC 4627 additionally requires an object or array at the top level; Skip Validation relaxes the token-level rules the same way Fix JSON does), and a Fix JSON toggle that repairs trailing commas, single-quoted strings, unquoted keys, comments, and curly quotes before formatting — Input also loads from a dragged-in or browsed file, a fetched http(s) URL, or a built-in example. QR Code also generates a scannable image from typed text, and decodes one back to text by dragging an image file in, browsing for one, or pasting an image from the clipboard, with Copy and Save for the generated code. Cron Expression Parser turns a standard 5-field expression into a plain-English description plus its next 5 run times. Every Tools window follows the app's native look and respects your chosen theme. New in 1.6.40; Image to Text and JSON Formatter added since.

maXfolders is developed by Christos Christodoulidis, maxfolders.com. See also Contact.

What's New

The first time you open a new version, the What's New window lists its new features, improvements and bug fixes, each in its own section. Its sidebar has every earlier release too — click one, use the arrows in its toolbar, or search them. Help → What's New in maXfolders opens it again any time. The Mac App Store edition's notes cover only what that edition includes.

Updates PRO

PRO maXfolders Pro updates itself. It checks maxfolders.com for a new version on startup and once a day, and when there is one it shows what's new: click Install Update and it downloads the update, checks that it's signed by maxfolders.com, replaces itself and relaunches, keeping your settings and Full Disk Access. Tick Automatically download and install updates in the future to skip that step next time. New in 1.6.60 (build 71). Update available on the bar above the function keys (new in 1.6.1), or File → Check for Updates… (new in 1.6.3), opens the same window right away. The Mac App Store edition is updated by the App Store.

Feedback

Click Feedback on that same bar to report a bug or request a feature without leaving the app. Enter the email you used to download maXfolders, a title, and a description; the form requires that email to already have a download on record. New in 1.6.32. In the Mac App Store edition there is no download, so any email you can be reached at works. The same sheet has a heart-shaped Like button. It doesn't need an email: leave the field empty and the like counts against this install alone. New in 1.6.54. If you do enter an email in Pro, it has to have a download on record. Tap it as many times as you like, with repeat taps batched into a single request and a running total shown beside it. New in 1.6.36. Whichever email you last used for either is remembered and fills back in automatically. New in 1.6.37.

Every key, click, and menu command. On a Mac keyboard, hold fn with the F-keys unless System Settings → Keyboard uses F1, F2, etc. as standard function keys.

In the app, Test Shortcut waits for a combination and jumps to that row if it is listed.