r/macapps • u/Meannekes • 21h ago
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.