ForkLift: the setup order that holds up

Most guides to a new file manager are feature tours. They work through the menus in the order the menus happen to be arranged, which is fine for a reference and useless on the first day. The reason the first day matters is that two decisions in ForkLift are offered exactly once, and reversing either of them later takes a documented recovery procedure involving a Terminal command.

What follows is ordered by consequence rather than by menu. Each step either unlocks the one after it or becomes expensive to redo.

Order	Step	Why it goes here
1	Install without overwriting version 3	The Finder prompt that offers this appears once
2	Answer the welcome window carefully	Favourite import is offered only on first launch
3	Grant Full Disk Access	Without it, Desktop and Downloads are invisible
4	Fill the Settings lists before using them	Tag autocompletion reads from a list that starts empty
5	Save repeated work as sidebar favourites	Presets only pay off from the third repetition
6	Add custom tools and wire the terminal handoff	Tools depend on the toolbar step being done twice
7	Make it the default file viewer	Requires a restart, so it belongs at the end

Install without destroying the old copy

The download is a zip that expands to an app, moved by hand into the Applications folder. If version 3 is already installed, the Finder raises a name collision, and the answer given there is not trivial. Keep both leaves version 3 intact, and the two versions can be installed and run at the same time. Replace removes the older copy.

Choosing Keep both makes the next step worth doing immediately: rename one of them. Two entries called ForkLift in the same folder produce a slow, recurring tax in Spotlight results, in the Dock and in every Open With menu.

There is a trap on the other side of this. Removing one of the two versions later must be done by dragging it to the Trash, never with an app deleter. The vendor's own documentation is explicit that deletion utilities collect supporting files belonging to both versions at once, which loses the settings and favourites of the copy meant to stay. That includes the app deleter built into ForkLift itself.

One installation detail prevents a confusing failure. If the app is launched for the first time from the Downloads folder rather than from Applications, macOS places it under quarantine, which shows up later as a read only update error and a Dock icon that disappears after a reboot. Moving it first avoids this. If it has already happened, the documented repair is sudo xattr -d -r -s com.apple.quarantine /Applications/ForkLift.app with the app quit.

Finally, if this is going to be a daily tool, right click the Dock icon and set Options to Keep in Dock and Open at Login now rather than later.

The welcome window is a one time offer

On first launch, a welcome window collects several settings before the app opens. Most of them are reversible from Settings afterwards. One is not, in practical terms.

The reversible ones: whether favourites sync through iCloud across multiple Macs, whether the app checks for updates, which theme to use, and whether to subscribe to the vendor's announcement list. Any of these can be changed later.

The one that matters is the offer to import favourites from ForkLift 3. Clicking past it is easy, and recovering from that is not a setting. The documented sequence is to disable Sync Favorites to iCloud in Settings, quit the app, delete its data from the iCloud storage manager in System Settings, delete the J3CP9BBBN6.com.binarynights.ForkLift folder inside the group containers directory, then run defaults delete com.binarynights.ForkLift.plist setupDone in a terminal so the welcome window appears again on the next launch.

Two categories do not come across at all, regardless of when the import runs. Multi Rename presets and sync favourites cannot be imported, because those features are built differently in the two versions. Anyone carrying years of rename rules should budget time to rebuild them by hand rather than discovering this mid migration.

After the welcome window, a registration window appears offering a purchase, a licence key field, and a Free Trial button. Trial mode is the right choice for the first sitting, because the steps below are what the evaluation should actually test.

Grant Full Disk Access before the first real task

This step is out of order in most guides, which treat it as a footnote. It belongs here because skipping it makes the app look broken in a way that has nothing to do with the app.

Without Full Disk Access, attached drives, the Desktop, the Downloads folder and the Documents folder are all unreachable, and drag and drop operations behave inconsistently. Those are precisely the locations a person with a file backlog wants to open first. An evaluation run without the permission is not an evaluation of the software.

The prompt appears on its own and can be followed directly. A notification permission request arrives separately, in the top right corner, and granting it is what makes long transfers report completion without the window being watched. Both can be set later in System Settings, but neither should be deferred past the first real task.

Fill the Settings lists before relying on them

Two features read from lists that start empty, and both look broken until the list is populated.

The first is tags. Since version 4.6, released March 31, 2026, tag autocompletion in the preview pane and the info window suggests matches as text is typed. It suggests only from tags that have been added under Settings, which is a consequence of a macOS restriction on third party access to the system tag database rather than a design choice. Adding the six or eight tags actually in use, before tagging anything, is what turns the feature on.

Once tags are in the list, two behaviours become available. Files can be tagged by dragging them onto a tag in the sidebar, which is faster than typing for bulk work. And visibility is separate from availability: right clicking a tag in Settings offers Hide from Sidebar, or several can be hidden at once through View then Show Sidebar Editor. A hidden tag still autocompletes.

The second list is the app deleter, which is off by default. It is enabled under Settings, General, with the option named Detect application when deleting. The vendor attaches a warning worth repeating: for apps with short names, or where several versions exist on the same Mac, the suggested deletion list can include more than it should, so it needs reviewing item by item before confirming.

Save repeated work as sidebar favourites

This is the step people skip, and it is the one that decides whether the app is still in use a month later.

Multi Rename opens by selecting more than one file and pressing Enter. Rules are stacked with the plus button in the sidebar of the rename window: case changes, text replacement including regular expressions, insertion at a chosen position, dates, and counters. Since version 4.7.1, released June 30, 2026, rules can also read metadata from inside the file, including content creation date, device model, dimensions, ISO speed, album and track number. That is what turns camera output into readable, sortable names.

The part that pays off is Add to Favorites at the bottom of that window. The rule stack lands in the sidebar, and from then on, dropping files onto it applies the rules without opening the window at all.

Sync works the same way. Open the destination in one pane, open the source in the other and leave it active, then choose Sync to from the Commands menu. The options panel covers direction, whether subfolders are included, whether hidden items are included, whether orphaned files in the target are deleted, a time offset correction for machines whose clocks disagree, and an exclude filter. Add to Favorites saves the whole configuration to the sidebar as a one click operation.

Workspaces cover the third kind of repetition: a saved set of tabs and locations, restored together. If the same four folders are opened every morning, that is one click instead of four navigations.

Where custom tools and the terminal handoff fit

Settings has a Tools section that accepts zsh scripts. A tool runs from the Commands menu, from the right click context menu, or from the toolbar.

The toolbar route takes two separate actions, and stopping after the first is the common mistake. Enabling Show in Toolbar while editing a tool only makes it eligible. It still has to be dragged in through Customize Toolbar, reached by right clicking the toolbar. Tools get a gear icon by default, and assigning a distinct icon while editing is worth the few seconds once more than two exist.

One change removed the most common cause of tools that fail silently. Since version 4.7.1, a tool can inherit the $PATH environment variable from the shell, so scripts calling binaries installed by a package manager work without absolute paths written into them.

For anything not repeatable, the app hands off. Open in Terminal launches Terminal, iTerm, Hyper, Kitty, Warp or Ghostty at the current local path, in a separate window. Deciding which of those is the target is a one time setting, and it is worth making it the terminal actually in use, because the handoff happens often enough that a mismatch is felt daily.

Make it the default file viewer last

This step is last because it needs a restart and because it changes behaviour outside the app.

Setting it as the system file viewer means almost every application that offers Reveal in Finder, Show in Finder or Open in Finder points here instead. The method is a pair of defaults write commands published in the manual, followed by a restart. The direct build and the Setapp build use different bundle identifiers, com.binarynights.ForkLift and com.binarynights.forklift-setapp, so the correct pair has to be chosen. Verification is simple: right click a folder inside the app and choose Reveal in Finder. If the folder opens in the same app, the setting took.

Two limits are documented. The Desktop is excluded, and system open and save panels are not replaced, which means a meaningful share of daily file navigation still runs through the system's own model of the disk. Reverting is a defaults delete and another restart, and removing the app entirely restores the Finder automatically.

What to set up first

Do steps one through three in a single sitting, before opening a real folder. They are cheap now and expensive later, and the third one determines whether anything else can be judged fairly. Then pick the single operation that consumes the most time in a normal week and turn it into a sidebar favourite, because that is the test of whether this tool actually removes work rather than relocating it.

If the answer at the end is that the setup is sound but the shell still lives in a second window, the constraint is the window count rather than the configuration, and the Features and Compared with other file managers pages of Atriens describe what changes when that boundary is removed.