Default Folder X not working: what to check, in order

Controls that appeared in every Save dialog yesterday are gone today. Or the menu bar icon has vanished. Or selecting a folder does nothing for several seconds and then nothing at all. The instinct is to reinstall, which wastes an afternoon and almost never helps, because the common causes sit in macOS permissions and in other utilities rather than in the application itself.

The order below is arranged by how often each cause turns out to be responsible and by how fast each one can be ruled out. Sorting the symptom first is what keeps this to a few minutes.

Sort the symptom before changing anything

Four symptoms, four different sets of causes. Treating them as one problem is what turns a short check into an afternoon.

Nothing appears anywhere, in any application. The cause is almost always a permission or the menu bar, not the application.

Controls are missing in one application only. The cause is that application, either because it was relaunched in a way the system did not report, or because its framework does not support the Accessibility API.

Everything appears, but selecting a folder is slow or has no effect. The cause is the system privacy database.

Everything appears and works, but something looks wrong: the screen grays out, unfamiliar folders fill the recent lists, buttons sit below the bottom of the screen. These are settings behaving as designed, not faults.

Deciding which of the four is happening takes ten seconds and determines the rest.

Check one: the menu bar icon is not where it should be

If the icon is enabled in settings and still not visible, there are two documented reasons and neither is a defect.

On macOS Tahoe, System Settings has a Menu Bar section with an Allow in the Menu Bar list. The switch next to the application has to be on. This is a system-level gate that sits above the application's own preference, so turning the icon on inside the app is not enough.

On a MacBook with a notch, the icon may exist but be hidden behind the notch. St. Clair Software suggests two fixes: move some system icons out of the menu bar and into Control Center to free horizontal space, or install a menu bar management utility that decides which icons stay visible. Either way the icon was running the whole time.

Only after both of these are ruled out is it worth treating a missing icon as the application failing to launch.

Check two: controls are missing in one application only

This has a specific and very common cause. The vendor documents it for Adobe Creative Suite and Microsoft Office 365 applications immediately after their own auto-updaters have run. The updater relaunches the application in a way that does not send macOS the notification that an application just launched, so Default Folder X never learns that the application exists and never sees its dialogs.

The fix is to quit and relaunch that application. Nothing else needs to change. Because auto-updaters run quietly in the background, the timing usually looks unrelated, which is why this gets misread as a general failure.

If quitting and relaunching does not restore the controls in that one application, the cause shifts to check six.

Check three: the privacy database is corrupted

Two distinct symptoms point at the same underlying cause, and both are documented by the vendor.

The first is being told that Accessibility permission is required when the switch in System Settings is already on. The second is folder switching becoming slow or stopping entirely: a folder is chosen in the dialog and the view takes several seconds to follow, or never does.

macOS stores these approvals in a privacy database, and when that database is damaged the state the system reports no longer matches the state shown in System Settings. Resetting the relevant entries and restarting is the published remedy. For the Accessibility-only case the vendor gives sudo tccutil reset Accessibility. For the slow folder switching case it gives four resets scoped to the application's bundle identifier, covering Accessibility, AppleEvents, SystemPolicyAllFiles, and ScreenCapture.

Two details matter here. The Mac has to be restarted immediately after the commands complete, or the approvals will not be rebuilt cleanly. And the Setapp build uses a different bundle identifier, with a -setapp suffix, so commands copied from the FAQ need adjusting for that build. Both points are stated on the vendor's FAQ page.

Anyone on a managed Mac without an administrator password stops here and has to ask whoever holds it, because every step in this check requires one.

Check four: another utility is taking the click

There is one named conflict worth checking before anything more drastic, because the symptom is distinctive: the controls appear in the dialog as expected, and then vanish the moment they are clicked.

The vendor attributes this to BetterMouse, a utility that adds options for mice and trackpads. Its click-through feature changes how macOS activates windows, and the result is that Default Folder X concludes the file dialog is no longer the active window and hides its own controls. Turning off Left click-through in BetterMouse settings, under the Buttons tab, resolves it.

The general lesson applies beyond that one application. Utilities that alter window activation, pointer behavior, or window management operate on the same layer, so a conflict is plausible whenever the symptom is controls appearing and then immediately disappearing.

Check five: a reminder that keeps coming back

A distinct complaint is the macOS screen recording reminder appearing on every single Open or Save dialog. The application does briefly capture an image of the dialog, to hide menu activity behind it and to detect Dark Mode, and macOS is designed to remind people periodically about apps with that permission. Every time is not the intended behavior.

The vendor describes this as the system's reminder mechanism getting out of sync, and publishes a two-command fix that writes an approval entry into the relevant system property list and then restarts the replayd process with killall -HUP replayd. The published procedure assumes macOS Sequoia 15.5 or higher and the application installed in the Applications folder, and the Setapp build again needs the -setapp identifier instead.

Worth knowing separately: the screen recording permission is not new behavior. The capture has always happened. Newer versions of macOS simply require explicit permission for it, which is why long-time users saw a new prompt without anything in the application changing.

Check six: the application is not supported

If a single application still shows no controls after being quit and relaunched, the cause may be structural rather than a fault.

The vendor states that all native macOS applications work, and that the exceptions are applications built on cross-platform frameworks such as Qt or Java, where the framework may not implement the Accessibility API correctly. Calibre is named as a case that works for some users and hangs for others. Non-native Java applications that do not use the standard macOS file dialogs are outside the scope entirely, since there is no standard dialog present to enhance.

For an application that hangs at launch while Default Folder X is running, the documented workaround is the exclusion list: open the menu bar icon, go to Settings and then Options, and use the plus button below the list to add the application. That stops the tool from touching it.

There is also a version mismatch case that looks like a failure. A license bought before March 1, 2023 prompts for a paid upgrade to version 6, at $9.95 for licenses after September 1, 2022 and $19.95 for older ones. Entering the old license number in the General tab reports which case applies. Version 6.3 covers macOS 10.13 through macOS 27, and older releases still exist for older systems, so running a version that predates the installed macOS is another way to see partial or no behavior.

Behaviors that are settings rather than faults

Four reports come up often and none of them is a malfunction.

The entire screen turns gray when a dialog opens. This is the Finder-click feature. Moving the pointer over a Finder window grays it to indicate that clicking will switch the dialog to that folder, and an option called Choose the Desktop when you click on it extends that to the whole desktop. Turning off that option, or turning off the highlighting of Finder windows, stops it.

Finder-click does not list every open window. Windows that are not actually visible on screen, including those on other Spaces or belonging to a hidden Finder, appear in the menu but do not highlight. Option-clicking Settings from the menu bar reveals an Additional Settings sheet with a switch for showing windows from all Spaces. Smart Folders, Recents, and search results never appear as clickable, because those windows have no single location to switch to.

Recent Folders and Recent Files fill with items nobody opened. The application watches cloud-synced folders from iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, and Box and adds new items appearing there. On a folder shared with colleagues, their changes land in the recent lists. The per-service checkboxes are under Settings and then Recent.

The buttons at the bottom of a file dialog sit below the edge of the screen. The vendor attributes this to macOS failing to remember a dialog size correctly. Holding Shift and clicking an edge of the dialog itself, not the bezel around it, then dragging toward the center resizes it in all directions. Dialog sizes are remembered per application, so this has to be repeated in each one. An Additional Settings option called Remember file dialog sizes overrides the system's memory when it keeps getting this wrong.

One more case belongs here because it is frequently reported as a fault and is not one. Hidden files and folders not appearing in a file dialog has nothing to do with this application. Pressing Command-Shift and the period key with a dialog open toggles them, and that is a standard part of the macOS Open and Save dialogs rather than an added feature. Anyone hunting through the application's settings for a hidden files switch will not find one.

What to change first

Start by naming the symptom out of the four listed at the top, then run only the checks that belong to it. For a missing menu bar icon, that is System Settings and the notch. For one misbehaving application, quit and relaunch it before anything else. For slow folder switching, the privacy database reset and a restart.

If the checks keep landing on permissions and on conflicts between utilities that all reach into the same window layer, the deeper question is how many tools are stacked on the file dialog at once. Fewer moving parts means fewer of these mornings, and a setup that keeps the folder tree and the terminal in one window removes the dialog from a good share of the day's work. The scope of that approach is described under Features, with the compatibility and licensing answers collected in the FAQ, and what Atriens does and does not replace is stated plainly there.