Hi @error404,
Thanks for sharing your solution. I shared this technique here:
https://totalfinder.binaryage.com/system-osax
But I didn’t promote the solution, because it is more technical and I was afraid of support from people who are non-technical and break things.
That symlink idea is interesting. I will look into why a Finder restart does not work in that scenario.
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:
rm /Volumes/<DiskName>/Library/ScriptingAdditions/TotalFinder.osax
mv /Volumes/<DiskName>/System/Library/ScriptingAdditions/TotalFinder.osax /Volumes/<DiskName>/Library/ScriptingAdditions/
ln -s /Volumes/<DiskName>/Library/ScriptingAdditions/TotalFinder.osax /Volumes/<SystemName>/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!
Just for record:
TotalFinder slow start was fixed in version 1.8.2.
TotalFinder running with SIP fully enabled was introduced in version 1.9.1.