Show HN: Marta – A fast and minimalistic file manager for macOS
marta.yanex.org
marta.yanex.org
One of my pet peeves with the Finder is that it still can't auto-layout the content to fit in the window - take a list view, open a folder .. and marvel at the fact that its the 21st century, but yet this list view still isn't capable of rendering itself for minimal-fit constraints. (I have to do it manually.) This is very frustrating, and I'd love to know of a solution ..
What exactly got worse in the Finder "these days"? I don't see anything that changed for the worse since OS X 10.2 If anything, current Finder is much improved in most aspects.
>One of my pet peeves with the Finder is that it still can't auto-layout the content to fit in the window - take a list view, open a folder .. and marvel at the fact that its the 21st century, but yet this list view still isn't capable of rendering itself for minimal-fit constraints.
Not sure what you mean, since the list view seems to work just fine.
This really should be laying itself out automatically - like if you hit Ctrl-Alt-Numpad+ on an Explorer window on a Windows machine, which has had the ability to present the view in a useful, readable auto-layout .. since 1995.
Why should they? I don't want the column sizes to change under me, I want them to stay as they were left. Some text labels (filename, other meta etc) could be too large to display anyway.
That said, you can double click the right divider on any column to have it expand to fit the largest of its contents.
Well, I want the window to expand to show me the content of the folder and the file metadata without me having to do anything special - no hotkeys, no special zones to remember.
This would make it actually useful, as a utility, rather than something I have to service, as a user, on a frequent basis in order to get the details I want.
It just seems so obviously broken and such an obvious feature that I can't think why it isn't being done .. nearly every other file-system explorer interface I use, on Linux and occasionally Windows, can show this information properly through auto layout without human intervention .. yet Finder is some kind of special.
The reason why the items are not sorted by date inside the groups, is because you have some other column selected as the sort column (e.g. the name, size, or whatever is the default).
You can click the "Date Modified", "Date created" or any date column you want, and then the items will be both grouped by date (into the groups you see, today, yesterday, last week, etc) AND sorted by date within the groups.
The finder could force it so that it always sorts by the item you selected to group by with, but this is more flexible.
Of course it does, since now they can click on the date column inside a group, and get the order they want for that group, in addition to the overall grouping into buckets based on date ranges.
>* I for one cannot fathom how this sorting arrangement is of use to anyone, personally ..*
Well, if I just wanted "show everything sorted by date" I could have done it in list view.
Grouped (arrangement) view shows the data in groups. What one might want the grouping to be and what the order to be inside the groups is not necessarily (if ever) the same.
E.g. if I want to look at files of a certain naming scheme that I created last week, I could set to arrange the finder items by date (so I get I nice "past week" group, today group, month group etc) and see the items inside sorted by name.
If I want the items in the groups sorted by date too -- I can just as easily.
If Finder could only use the same column to form groups that it uses to sort inside the group I couldn't do that.
This is the most flexible way -- and analogous to what all and any database systems offer, where group by column is not necessarily the same as the order by column.
Though I also tend to have ShiftIt or SizeUp installed and always use the keyboard shortcut instead.
I find it to be quite configurable, easy to use and quite better than the available alternatives.
https://fman.io/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13764060
I would say people who truly care about 100% macOS may choose Marta, people who care about cross-platform and a Python-based plugin API will choose fman.
I tried the closed alpha of fman (and also the number of other file managers) because of curiosity. I naively hoped that someone has already done what I need. ;)
Well, the problem is that Sublime Text is the only GUI cross-platform application with the native behavior I know, so it's more like an exception. And it shows that making portable tools right is not that simple.
I don't think we are the direct competitors. fman is a completely another project with its own strong and weak points. I tried fman and didn't like it because of numerous reasons, but it's my own opinion.
https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask
EDIT: details on how to add your own Cask for an app:
https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask/blob/master/doc/de...
Just if it was not clear: my email is public on many services. I just think that if you require my email to get the installer, how much logging/tracking code will you run once you're on my machine?
I know it's all about trust, but Marta doesn't have any tracking code, and never will. Trust is much more important that any statistics.
It's the same with me. If I am using a really early stage app and actually helping with testing it the last thing I would want to do is to pretty much sign up for it with my email unless I desperately need that app.
You need to freely provide the download. No one is going to give you their email address to download what should be an open source project.
But I completely understand you. I hope Marta will be available for everyone quite soon (maybe at the time of 0.2).
I don't trust that the organization, or whoever it gets sold to in the future, won't try to monetize my email address, from now until forever.
I changed some of my plans. Marta will become open much earlier, maybe even the next week. Sorry for the inconvenience.
It's not free, but they've just releaseed a new major version, and it's the first time I've found a file manager I'm happy with on Mac.
Would make the homepage more engaging and demonstrate value quicker.
And yet it does just that with all the buttons and UI items that visually blend in each other.
Constrast to the Finder:
- View > As Columns (this is a legacy from NeXT Step that I still love 17 years after first seeing it, and use it daily).
- View > Hide Sidebar
- View > Hide Status bar
There: you have a minimalist and fast view of the FS, with zero UI clutter, and 100% browseable with the keyboard.
Next best thing I could find was Path Finder (http://cocoatech.com)
Way back when, I sold a shareware file manager for DOS. I think the program was something like 32KB. :-) Times have changed.
[1]: https://fman.io
From https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html which I feel is applicable here, since it's invite only alpha.
Marta has – but the difference is that it doesn't provide the direct link.
But if you have some specific problems with Marta, you can always contact me at mail@yanex[dot]org, or leave the TODO request here: https://quip.com/TOH6Abh8ruxi.
Where does Marta fit in among file managers (esp very serious ones) and Finder plugins for OSX? Are other features (for e.g. FTP or so? Though it says minimal) are planned or already exist?
> spend your time fixing their problems so they can continue making money with crapy software
someone needs some Stallman love
But it would be an interesting idea to make a "set up wizard" that will suggest users disable the icons.
By the way, you can already change the font (https://marta.yanex.org/docs#fonts).