TotalFinder comes with another app running in the background called TotalFinderCrashWatcher. This is the app that is causing the spinning wheel when you launch TotalFinder. My solution was to simply kill TotalFinderCrashWatcher app and locate it with the TotalFinder.app (context menu > Show Package Contents) and delete it. So far perfect!
Been tolerating the insufferable startup beach ball since Sierra. Removed TotalFinderCrashWatcher & then I needed to restart my computer several times just to witness & revel in how fast it starts up now.
Now if someone could only figure out how to replace ALL the sidebar icons with my own custom color icons, I’d be in TotalFinder bliss! Time to hunt the forum & see if there’s a solution for that!
My apologies for this neglected issue. I’m going back to TotalFinder and investigate it soon. If the problem is really just the CrashWatcher launch, you can disable it via Terminal.app using this tweak:
For changing Icons in the Finder Sidebar:
Go here:
/Applications/TotalFinder.app/Contents/Resources/TotalFinder.bundle/Contents/Resources/icons2.plist
Copy that file to your Desktop and edit it (with TextEdit or different editor) the way you want -> Put the path to your icon inside the “key”.
Save the file and paste it inside the original location. Type in your admin password to replace the file.
Restart Finder and enjoy your icons!
TotalFinderCrashWatcher is a process which reacts to Finder.app crashes. It looks what caused the crash by inspecting the crash call stack. And if it was something likely caused by TotalFinder, it offers a dialog for submitting the crash report to us (instead to Apple).
In another words, TotalFinderCrashWatcher is not essential for TotalFinder operation.
Like many others, I left TF because I wasn’t comfortable disabling SIP (Yes, yes, I know. Our systems ran just fine before SIP, but still…). Anyway, I just came across this post and the update by @rjrggr and decided to give TF another chance. I can confirm that @rjrggr’s tip works as advertised with one minor change.
After moving TotalFinder.osax to /System/Library/ScriptingAdditions and re-enabling SIP, TF continued to work fine except for changing certain options. In particular, options that require a Finder restart such as disabling tabs. Presumably because TF needs to write to /Library/ScriptingAdditions/TotalFinder.osax and it isn’t there. I suspect that TF updates would also fail for the same reason.
The problem appears to be solved by a simple symlink from /System/Library/ScriptingAdditions/TotalFinder.osax back to /Library/ScriptingAdditions (I did this In a regular login shell; no need to boot to the recovery partition). All options now seem to work, I have column autoresizing goodness and fully enabled SIP. Yay.
After reading your solution I made a minor change to mine. In the recovery partition, I moved TotalFinder.osax back to /Library/ScriptingAdditions and symlinked it to /System/Library/ScriptingAdditions:
TF continues to work normally. TF should also be able to update without issue as long as the filename ‘TotalFinder.osax’ does not change. If an Apple update removes the symlink from /System/Library/ScriptingAdditions, it’s trivial to just re-link it.
Wow! Thanks for investigating this. After hearing about your solution with the symlink I wanted to explore this possibility.
If osax subsystem really first looks into /System/Library/ScriptingAdditions before it tries to use osax files in /Library/ScriptingAdditions and respects symlinks, that would be a good solution. We would get the best of both worlds.
I could also create a simple shell script to automate symlinking in recovery mode for everyone to use it as the default installation setup.
Just would like to add that even though I have ‘TotatFinder.osax’ in ‘/Volumes//System/Library/ScriptingAdditions/’, with SIP fully enabled’, I am able to change all the options in TotalFinder, even those that require Finder restart!?! I also updated the the latest version of MacOS Sierra without affecting my TotalFinder installation!