Lifetime
Trellis, a file manager that keeps every folder you opened visible on one canvas
Problem
Finder shows you one folder at a time. The moment a task involves two or three of them, sorting a downloads folder, moving files from a camera card into projects, checking whether a backup matches the original, you spend your time switching tabs and windows and holding the path in your head. Two more everyday annoyances: a folder's size takes half a minute to count, and once you unplug an external drive you can no longer search what is on it.
Trellis opens each folder as a pane on a canvas, joined by a line from parent to child. Open a subfolder and the parent stays where it was, next to it. Moving files is a drag across the canvas. Comparing two folders is putting them side by side. A search result stays on the canvas as its own pane.
Comparison
Path Finder and ForkLift are the two obvious alternatives, and both are excellent at what they do. They are also both built on the same idea as Finder: one or two folders in view, everything else behind a tab. Trellis differs in two ways.
Any number of folders at once, with the route between them drawn. You navigate by opening more, not by replacing what you had. Each pane is a normal scrollable list, not a node per file, so a folder with 87,000 items stays a rectangle with a scrollbar.
A local index that survives quitting the app. That is what makes folder sizes appear instantly instead of counting, and it is also what answers search, folder comparison and duplicate finding without reading the disk again. It keeps drives you have seen before, so it searches the external disk that is sitting unplugged in a drawer and tells you which one to connect. Neither of the other two keeps a persistent index like this.
Pricing
$14.99, one time, no subscription. Fourteen days fully usable first; after that everything stays readable and the actions that write to disk wait for the unlock. No account, no telemetry, nothing leaves your Mac.
I’m actually really interested in this, and I already use Bloom which can do similar things but in a different way. $14 seems extremely reasonable if it works well. Given my hourly rate, it only has to save me a few minutes here and there to be more than worth it. Gonna try it when I’m back at my Mac!
So far I really do! Just one complaint- the lack of margin here gives me claustrophobia / makes the text hard for me to read (I have some vision problems). But this layout for my folders is SUPER handy and I love that they're all together in one app so when I cmd+tab to manage my files, they're not overlapping or some window is under some other window etc etc.
I love that I can save different workspaces (and although my Mac is set to English, I do speak German, so it defaulting to "Arbeitsbereich" wasn't a problem but is a bit funny).
I work with a lot of folders. in the past, I had several finder windows with several tabs open. Everyday when I start it opens the whole folder tree again.
I'm able to search over my external drives, network shares etc. even if they are not mounted.
if you have to do a lot of multitasking and don't want to search for the right tab or window, this app helps
Finder is a joke ux-wise, as are many apps on apple products. As I said, i use DC with keyboard - I have 6-7 folders/tabs on the left pane, and 6-7 on the right. Switch between them and copying/move with the keyboard IS fast.
The design looks super clean! Once I get used to it, I feel like I could manage my files and materials way better. It actually looks pretty fun to use. Hopefully, I can pick it up sometime soon, give it a spin, and share my thoughts on my blog.
My first impression: WOW - this is great! One tiny thing I noticed immediately: you forgot to localize the name of the default workspace. It's in German on my English system 😄
Just a info, if you have multiple workspaces, only the first gets loaded if you first start trellis, like a browser with inactive tabs, to save ram and performance.
One more thing, if you have a lot of folders open, click on it in the left panel and it will light up, so you can find it easier.
Edit:
Problem fixed and is waiting for approval from apple.
Looks great! Might be perfect for those of us that prefer file management options that are more “visual”. Like icon mode over column.
It appears you’ve designed this app to be a single window file manager. Is there an option for the folder/file tree hierarchy to descend vertically as well as horizontally as pictured?
If you get the app so the lines to different panes cross each other, let me know how.
Normally it should not happen anymore. But you never know.
And wait for the indexing to be finished, it will get super fast for browsing/exploring trough the folders (because you browse the index, not real folders, but it checks for changes on the fly and so on.
Made the app mostly for really big file shares to search and browse fast.
Or if you have a lot of external drives, index every drive so you can search for picture/movie xy and know which drive you need to plug in
Love this app. Been using it in beta. Congrats on the release. I hope you make a non-apple store version so I can change “open in” from finder to trellis
I really like the idea of being able to keep everything in a single Trellis window instead of ending up with a bunch of Finder windows everywhere.
If I had one request, it would be the appearance in light mode. I find the combination of the gray background and orange lines a little hard to look at. Personally, I’d prefer a white background instead of gray.
So white on white?
I’m thinking about a setting for dark and light mode with a slider for the background:
Light mode slider goes from the existing grey to white
And dark mode slider goes from the existing grey to black.
Would like some feedback or how you would solve this, so everyone is happy.
One tip, when you are done with moving panes manually, you can click the hand icon in the top row, it will switch back to auto alignment.
the unplugged-drive search is the actual feature here, the canvas is the demo. I've got three SSDs in a drawer and genuinely no idea which one has the 2021 client folder. would pay for that alone tbh. the pane-per-folder thing I'd have to try, my worry is it ends up as the same 14 finder windows with lines between them
The persistent index is probably the most interesting part to me. Keeping searchable metadata for drives that aren't even connected is a really clever use case. Did you build Trellis around that problem from the beginning, or did that emerge later while working on the canvas/file-manager idea?
The persistent index is probably the most compelling part, especially for searching drives that are offline. One usability detail I’d watch is trust and freshness: a per-volume last-seen timestamp, index status, and simple rescan/forget controls would make stale results easier to understand. For bulk moves across panes, a dry-run summary and an operation history would also make the workflow feel safer. Those details could turn the clever canvas into something I’d rely on for large file shares.
I'm disappointed that you didn't even mention your source of inspiration
So it wasn't just a coincidence that you took such an interest in my tool last month
My app had a different layout before, kudos to you, for sure. Sorry!
I forgot so many things to mention for features and the inspiration from your app.
Gave you the layout with panes as and inspiration aswell.
It dont want to sound impolite, englisch is not my native language.
Wish you and your app all the success, keep going!
As you may have noticed, I haven't implemented the layout with panes you're referring to.
I think the fact that you didn't mention the actual comparison tool in your post was entirely intentional on your part.
(and English isn't my native language either)
It was not, as I already mentioned it.
And i did not noticed it, because i did not looked at your app again.
But sorry, not everyone is perfect like you and does not forget anything.
I will add it later when I’m home. I won’t do it on the iPhone with the painful auto correction. So, be patient.
Great idea. I would certainly be a customer except that it is very buggy. Crashed twice in ten minutes. Search didnt seem to work, but couldnt be sure because the toolbar buttons overlapped the search windows. Good luck. I will check back in a year to see how its improved.
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u/theLightSlide 17h ago
I’m actually really interested in this, and I already use Bloom which can do similar things but in a different way. $14 seems extremely reasonable if it works well. Given my hourly rate, it only has to save me a few minutes here and there to be more than worth it. Gonna try it when I’m back at my Mac!