All of the suggestions for a file manager for OS X can’t do what I am looking for in a file manager. They are all great at browsing and viewing files an folders but all are limited when it comes to moving files and folders around. Pathfinder seems to be my favorite right now and I could never get rixstep to run. It would always crash on launch.

So none of them can do what I need them to do most of the time. It’s the merge thing that was discussed that in my daily work I do probably 4 or 5 times a day. This is at work in a Windows environment. At home on my Mac I haven’t wanted to do this much.

However, in my quest to find something that can do what I want I read a few articles about the philosophy of how OS X views files and folders. It seems that OS X doesn’t view files and folders being any different from each other. And this is why Finder, or any other file manager for OS X, can’t do this type of operation. OS X doesn’t see a folder as a container with other objects in it. It sees folders as a single object. That’s why when you copy a folder over another folder with the same name it will replace that whole folder and not just the stuff in the folder that’s different. Because at that level OS X can’t see what’s in the folder, just the folder and replaces the whole thing.

Any file manager that you place on top of OS X is restricted to this reality of how OS X views all files and folders as objects. So it seems it is impossible to write a file manager for OS X that doesn’t follow the rules of OS X. It seems that any tool that can perform more complex operations either bypass the OS X environment and uses the command line tools or uses scrips to automate a task.

Now if you use the applications in OS X to manage the files for that application you will never have to use a file manager. And this seems to be the way OS X wants you to manage your files, hence the lack of a need to change the way the OS handles objects.