SNAX - a Cocoa Finder replacement

Oct 04, '01 02:23:56AM

Contributed by: robg

If you haven't had the chance yet, check out SNAX from CocoaTech. SNAX is a shareware Finder-replacement written entirely in Cocoa, and it has a number of interesting features, including:

Take a look at this screenshot of the main SNAX window to get an idea of some of SNAX' features. I've played with it for a couple of hours now, and I'm quite impressed. The speed is good, and it seems to offer most of the Finder's features and more without quite so much overhead.

UPDATE: On Friday, 10/5/2001, Snax 1.1 was released. This release is optimized for OS X 10.1, and includes numerous bug fixes, speed tweaks, and a few new features. It's notably faster than the previous version on my 10.1 installation...

If you like SNAX, you can do something even more interesting with it. I snapped this screenshot of my OS X 10.1 box earlier tonight. Notice that Snax is running but the Finder is not. That's because Snax is my Finder. It's relatively trivial to replace the Finder with any program you wish, and I replaced it with SNAX for this screenshot.

Read the rest of this article if you'd like to find out how to make SNAX your permanent Finder...

How was this done? The key is a tip and comments that were published here way back in April. Simply execute this in a terminal:

defaults write com.apple.loginwindow Finder /Applications/SNAX.app
You can use whatever you like in place of the Finder (just use the full path to the program and don't forget the ".app" extension); the above example will use SNAX. Logout and login, and you'll have SNAX instead of the Finder. This will hold true for all reboots and logins; SNAX is now your Finder! Although your old Finder is gone, you'll still have the Dock to use in conjunction with SNAX.

There are some things to watch for -- you lose Finder-specific options such as desktop pictures and control over the trash warning and file extensions, for example. In addition, you can accidentally quit SNAX, as it has a Quit command. If that happens, simply launch the real Finder from the Dock.

To undo the change and return to using the 'real' Finder, launch the Terminal and type:
defaults delete com.apple.loginwindow Finder
Once you logout and login, things will be back to normal.

If you're not thrilled with Apple's finder, check out SNAX for an example of a good alternative!

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