Not All TotalFinder Files Removed When Uninstalled

TotalFinder
1

I’m filing this as an issue vs. a bug; but I recently blew my new 16" MacBook Pro 2019 because TF was exhibiting some glitches:

  1. I turned Visor on for a few days and then turned it off on this Mac, as I wasn’t totally pleased with it (using on other Macs) on my Thunderbolt Displays. After that, I ran into the following issues:

  • It still shows the single blue button in the upper left corner of the Finder window.

  • In some cases closing the 2nd tab closes the entire Finder window.

  1. The Apple Tabs bar displays even though the Hide Tab Bar option is active

I uninstalled TotalFinder, reinstalled it; but still ran into the above issues after uninstall, restart and reinstall. I wiped and rebuilt my Mac at that point, and found after the rebuild and then restore from Time Machine that the symptoms remained. I uninstalled TF again; and the following two (2) files remained on my Mac, even though the uninstall script said it completed correctly.
com.binaryage.totalfinder.agent.sfl
TotalFinderCrashWatcher_27F2BF63-49D7-5CB5-9EDC-DAD8AB2E81E8.plist

I found these files on my Mac with Spotlight, and deleted them. I’m going to restart my Mac and then see how it behaves before reinstalling TotalFinder again.

I’m going to restart and then reinstall. However, I have too many apps with registration codes that I may no longer be able to put my hands on, to wipe this Mac again, and then rebuild it without using my Time Machine backup to restore all the apps.

Any insight you can provide would be helpful. Let me know what other information you might need to look into this, and I’ll do my best to provide it.

Chris Spera

2

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your feedback.

  1. a) This is probably a bug. I would need to reproduce it here on my machine to fix it. I guess it is just a glitch caused by disabling the visor feature. Killing Finder.app via CMD+OPT+ESC and launching TotalFinder.app again should work around it.

  2. b) I noticed this as well in this case:
    2.1. have multiple tabs
    2.2. in one tab switch to some folder which is a volume mounted from DMG
    2.3. unmount the volume, e.g. by clicking on “eject” icon in the sidebar
    2.4. the folder goes away and Finder wound normally close the window with folder view, but since this is a TotalFinder tab something unexpected happens and whole TotalFinder window goes away. I would nee to investigate this further.

  3. AFAICT Hide Tab Bar option is effective only when you have a single native tab in Apple Tabs. Actually the menu option should be disabled when there are multiple tabs present in currently selected window.

As of uninstallation I have just updated the docs:

Yes, I don’t delete plists during uninstallation. And that is by design.

Not sure how the files you mentioned were created. I looks to me as some cached temporary files created by the system. I think Apple has some subsystem for doing backups/caches of plist files internally. Maybe those are working files from that.