AppleEvents Broken if TotalFinder Moved

cerniuk · April 24, 2017, 8:29pm

I turned off my SIP so I could organize my applications folder a long time ago. Apple’s teenager-toss-everything-on-the-floor approach to organization leaves a lot to be desired.

Anyway, if I put TotalFinder in a folder within the Applications folder, it fails to send AppleEvents properly. This suggest that the application path is hard coded into TotalFinder… (ahem).

darwin · April 24, 2017, 9:24pm

Yes. TotalFinder’s injector code (TotalFinder.osax) expects TotalFinder.bundle to be at specific location(s). The apple event simply contains a request for injection, but does not contain a path or other specification where to find the bundle to be injected.

You can reconfigure it by creating ~/.totalfinder-install-location text file which will contain path to your custom TotalFinder.bundle.

Please look at this code:

github.com

binaryage/totalfinder-osax/blob/0063139851ef5c448a5be694de248c179d628457/TotalFinderInjector.m#L235


  }
  if (![fileManager isReadableFileAtPath:path]) {
    NSLog(@"TotalFinderInjector: unexpected situation, filesystem path exists but it is not readable: %@", path);
    return false;
  }
  return true;
}
return false;
}


static NSString* determineTotalFinderBundlePath() {
// config file can override standard installation location
NSFileManager* fileManager = [NSFileManager defaultManager];
NSString* installLocationConfigPath = [@TOTALFINDER_INSTALL_LOCATION_CONFIG_PATH stringByStandardizingPath];
if ([fileManager fileExistsAtPath:installLocationConfigPath]) {
  NSData* configData = [fileManager contentsAtPath:installLocationConfigPath];
  if (configData) {
    NSString* content = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:configData encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
    if (content && [content length]) {
      if (checkExistenceOfTotalFinderBundleAtPath(content)) {
        return content;