What's new in SyncCloud

Long runs leave the window usable

• ⚡Progress moves to the toolbar. A copy, move, trash, Compare sync, Verify All or duplicate merge no longer puts a progress dialog over the window that takes every click until it ends. A capsule in the middle of the toolbar shows the run's progress and count, and the current file when you point at it; its stop button or ⌘. stops it, and Esc doesn't, since Esc clears the selection. Pane PDF tools and Save as PDF show their progress there too. While a run goes on you can browse, preview and keep working in Edit's document, its own undo included; what would write files, and ⌘Z for file operations, are grayed, with a tooltip saying what to wait for.
• ⚡Results show in the pane. The message about what just happened docks with the pane's action bar instead of floating across the top of the window, where it covered the header's Delete. Compare shows it in the pane that acted, and VoiceOver announces each one. A message with an Undo button no longer also says "Press ⌘Z to undo".

Packages and repositories stay whole

• 📦A package is one item. Duplicates no longer groups, trashes or merges the files inside a .key, .pages, .app or .photoslibrary bundle: the package counts as one item, and a copy holding one is never folded away. Restructure moves packages, and links that resolve, whole; the survey counts a package as one document; and no plan reaches inside one. Organize never files a document into a package, and won't create a folder named like one, such as "Notes.rtfd".
• 📦A repository is not a copy of its working tree. .git, node_modules and .build are still left out of the comparison, but they now count toward their folder's identity. So a repository and an unzipped copy of its files are never called identical, and Apply recommended can't trash the repository. The scan no longer reads the files under them.

A removal never takes the last copy

• 🛡Overlapping groups keep a keeper. A folder that holds, or sits inside, another group's keeper is protected, including a keeper you picked by hand, and the last check before removal refuses it with a reason of its own. One Apply recommended can no longer send every copy to the Trash.
• 🛡A copy holding what couldn't be read is kept. A merge whose copy holds a folder it couldn't read — permission denied, or a cloud folder whose app didn't answer in time — is refused, naming the folder. Trash right copy refuses a copy holding items the left one lacks, or, for overlapping folders, a file the left one has with another date, and points to Merge into keeper; it refuses a copy that is any group's keeper too.
• 🛡A folder that isn't empty stays. Restructure no longer trashes a drained folder still holding .env, .gitignore or an Office lock file; only macOS's own files, such as .DS_Store, are ignored. Undoing New Folder leaves the folder in place if anything is still inside it.

Undo puts back what it moved, and only that

• ↺⌘Z restores from the Trash only what it put there. Each backup's identity is recorded when its undo is registered and checked before the restore. A different file that has since taken the same name in the Trash stays there, and the banner names it.
• ↺The harder undos work. Two files moved onto one name with Replace; a moved link that dangles where it lands; the copy of a file locked in Finder; a merge's emptied source folder, which now comes back with its tags, icon and dates; and a source folder trashed since the move, which is recreated. A batch of moves is undone last item first, so a merge inside it comes apart cleanly. A folder you only opened in Finder, which gives it a .DS_Store, no longer makes ⌘Z refuse it as changed. A redo refuses to replace anything its undo didn't leave at the destination.
• ↺Undo Last Run says what it will do — a copy run's copies go to the Trash, a move run's files go back — and confirms it is undoing the run you picked.
• ↺A move that leaves its original behind says so. When a move's cleanup can't remove the original and leaves it under a hidden name, an alert now names the leftover; before, only the log did.

Moving and copying

• 📁Replace refuses the folder an item is inside, as Finder does. Pasting Photos/Photos into the folder above it and answering Replace no longer trashes the outer folder with everything in it. Keep Both and Merge still work. Replace over a symbolic link now replaces the link; before, it failed every time.
• 📁A move to another disk keeps the original until the copy is complete, and honors Cancel. On a disk with no Trash, a folder that can't be fully removed keeps both copies, and the alert says the original may be partly removed.
• 📁Files locked in Finder. A locked file can be copied, and the copy keeps the lock; your own file is never unlocked. Moving a locked item is refused before anything is written, and the hidden staging copies a locked file used to leave behind are cleared.
• 📁A sync's Replace takes the source's metadata, so a script made executable at the source is executable after a sync. Edit's saves keep the original file's, as before.
• 📁A copy asks a cloud-only folder's app first, with a deadline, and refuses at the first folder that doesn't answer, instead of holding every later file operation behind it.
• 📁Copy or Move to the other pane lands where that pane opens. A file from Dropbox's Documents lands in Google Drive's My Drive, not at the account root outside it, and rows under iCloud's linked Documents are no longer refused as outside the pane. A pane's own opening folder merges into the other pane's, offered as Merge or Skip, so a pane's root is never replaced.
• 📁A Download that can't start shows the file in Finder, which can fetch it, from the row menu and File ▸ Download as the preview already did, instead of doing nothing.

Compare leaves its guesses to you

• ⚖A row whose direction is a guess is held out of bulk runs: sizes that differ while the dates are within the tolerance or missing, two names that differ only invisibly, a folder against a file, and a row whose source is a symbolic link. Sync All, Copy Remaining and synccloud sync leave such rows out and say how many; the header reads "2 need your decision"; and the Review card leads with the row's note and stays on the rows left.
• ⚖Copy either way from any row. Every row's right-click menu, and Review's, offers a Copy to … item for each side that exists, against the suggested direction as readily as with it, and warns first when that overwrites the newer file. A row copying from a link offers none.
• ⚖Match Dates sets dates, not bytes, for pairs Verify has read in full and found identical: the right file takes the left one's modification date, to the nanosecond, as one undoable step, listed in Sync History with the date it replaced and undone by Undo Last Run. A pair with a link on either side is left out, and an undo that leaves a file alone says so.
• ⚖Verify rereads a file whose date was put back. Its cache of file contents is now keyed on the file's number and status-change time as well as its path, date and size, so an edit that restores the date and keeps the size (touch -r, rsync -t, exiftool -P) is not taken for the old file.
• ⚖The command line. -L and -R match a provider's exact id first and refuse a display name two providers share, listing each one's id and folder; the sync plan prints both folders before the prompt. scan prints [needs-decision] for a held row, and --json gives every row needsDecision. synccloud sync exits 0 only when every planned file was copied; any skipped file exits 1, each cause with its own line on stderr, and so does a declined prompt.

Organize and Setup

• ▤Undo This Reorganization… asks first, naming what the landing did, and a banner reports every outcome. Restructure records each step as it runs, so a landing cut off partway can say what ran.
• ▤Keep separate and Never Suggest This Again can be taken back: ⌘Z and a banner undo the last one, and Show them again brings back older ones. Closing the Restructure plan sheet keeps a changed plan, and Discard Plan drops it.
• ▤Each Setup folder keeps its own Restructure history. Walking a different folder starts with none, or takes back that folder's own; the roster follows every walk. An old profile folder is never removed while it holds something the active one lacks.
• ▤Filing refuses what it can't stand behind: a file that changed or vanished since the scan; a date stamp either convention could have written — "05062023" could be May 6 or June 5, and the skip names both; a folder name from the model that the provider won't sync; and a destination that is the file's own folder through a link, where it now says the file is already there. Its refusals come under "Filing Failed", not "Sync Failed".
• ▤A download counter is not a version. "invoice.pdf", "invoice (1).pdf" and "invoice (2).pdf" — three months' bills — no longer form a versions group offering to trash two of them; a name carrying a download counter groups only when its contents match.
• ▤Restructure matches subfolders and file names regardless of case, skips the merges planned into a rename it had to skip, recreates a merged file's source folder when undoing, and gives a cloud-only folder a bounded time to answer instead of hanging the plan sheet.
• ▤Setup keeps a reading that lands late, for the folder it read. Once a reading is done, Continue keeps it and Learn Again is a button of its own. Removing a person from the roster asks first, and a profile that can't be written stays on Structure with the reason and Continue Without Saving. Closing Setup any way, quitting included, keeps the open screen's answers. Structure says when it is still reading, hiding its counts until the reading is in, or when the reading failed, and its button reads Skip Saving until the reading is done. Setup's buttons use Title Case.

Edit and PDF

• 📄A version that arrives while Edit is saving is kept, beside the file as "(other version)", and the save says so, at quit too. Keep Mine replaces only the version it asked about. Autosave no longer asks about its own write, and typing during a slow write is saved.
• 📄Fill & Sign keeps your work when a sync app renames the open PDF aside for a moment, and a PDF tool runs against the version of the file it started on.
• 📄PDF copies say more about what they lose. Protect, a form's Clean Metadata and Fill & Sign's form save now say when the copy drops tags for screen readers, layers or color output intent, as the other tools did.
• 📄Keep a PDF's comments. Fill & Sign on a PDF with no form drew the file's review comments into the copy as ink. The note card now offers "Keep comments as comments", off by default and for that save only, which carries each comment across whole, with its text, popup and replies; the saved message says when one couldn't be kept and was drawn in. It is grayed, with the reason, while links under corrections are being removed.
• 📄Save as PDF reads a picture slide on the CPU when the Mac's Neural Engine refuses the request, instead of saving the slide with no words to search.
• 📄Remove the links under a correction. A correction typed over a link leaves the link working in the copy unless you turn on "Also remove links under corrections" in the note card, off by default and for that save only. On macOS 26 that copy loses the page labels, attached files, viewer settings and language the other copies keep.
• 📄The text holds still. The "changed on disk" banner and the read-only note float over the foot of the text instead of pushing every line down. The status line no longer shows the previous file's counts or Line/Col after a switch, and keeps Line/Col in place while "That change needs Source." or "Reloaded — changed elsewhere" is showing.

Around the app

• ⌨One spelling, one case, one count. The app's words use US spelling — color, gray, Reorganization — curly quotes and apostrophes, Title Case on menus, and counts that read "1 item" and "1,200 files". Settings search still finds "colour". The reversible delete is Move to Trash everywhere, Sync History included. Progress titles use sentence case, Edit's empty page offers New Text File, and the time to read a folder's documents is estimated from its size — "A few minutes", "About 30 min", "About 3 h" — instead of always "About 3 h". The command-line tool prints quotes, apostrophes, dashes and ellipses as plain ASCII; file names, paths and provider names print exactly as they are.
• ⌨⌃⇧⇥ goes to the previous tab in Browse, the reverse of ⌃⇥ (in Compare, ⌃⇥ switches panes), and the Go menu lists Next Tab and Previous Tab once each.
• ⌨Color you can read. Links in both Markdown Previews use a shade of the accent that reads in light and dark. A colored pill's words are black or white, with the color in its fill, and a button's colored words use a shade that reads. Switches, checkboxes, sliders and progress bars take the app's accent, in sheets and popovers too, not the Mac's, unless the accent is None.
• ⌨The tab strip stays under the pointer when you close down to one tab from it, or with Close Tab from the pane header's or a row's menu, and slides away once the pointer leaves, so the pane doesn't jump up under you. ⌘W still hides it at once.
• ⌨VoiceOver names the Sources switch, the swap-panes button, the inspector's close button and a tab's source; decorative logos are hidden from it; and ages are read in words.
• ⌨Settings. Replacing the Anthropic key no longer deletes the old one first, and a refused save keeps the typed key. Clear, Clear History and Remove ask first.

PDFs open in Edit

• 📄PDFs open in Edit. ⌘O, Open in Edit on a file's right-click menu and in the Info inspector, the preview's Edit button and a click in Edit's file pane all open a PDF now, as do Open in Edit on a PDF's row in Compare's list of differences and on a copy in Organize's duplicates. The file you opened is never modified: rotating, reordering or deleting pages, compressing, filling and signing each write a new PDF beside it, so there is no Autosave switch or format bar. ⌘P prints its own pages. Finder's Open With does not offer SyncCloud for PDFs.
• 📄The Text Files list is now Files, the folder's text files and its PDFs each under a heading of their own.
• 📄A PDF's header has a text file's two rows. The first holds the name, then Find, Fill & Sign and Tools, then Expand and Close; the second says what the file is — "PDF · Letter, 8.5 × 11 in · 42 KB · Text selectable", the paper of the page you are on. Point at "PDF" for its version, and right-click the name for Reveal in Browse. In a narrow column the buttons drop their words together before the name is cut.
• 📄Locked and damaged PDFs say so. A PDF that needs a password asks for it — This PDF needs a password — and SyncCloud uses it only to open the file and doesn’t save it. One PDFKit cannot read says Couldn’t read this PDF., with Quick Look and Open in Preview under it, and one still in the cloud says it is not downloaded, with a Download button.

Reading a PDF

• 📖Pages and Outline. With a PDF open the side column gains a Pages tab of thumbnails — click one to go to that page — with a Grid / List switch, kept across launches. Grid adds a column as the side column is dragged wider; List puts one page under another at the column's width, drawn sharp at that size. A PDF with two or more bookmarks gains an Outline tab that lists them; a click goes to the bookmark's own place on its page.
• 📖The page number and the zoom float over the pages, in a capsule at the bottom: ‹ and › turn the page, − and + step through 50, 75, 100, 125, 150, 200 and 400%, and the zoom opens a menu with those steps and Fit Page, Fit Width and Actual Size. Every PDF opens at Fit Page. Drag the capsule by its grip to a corner or the middle of any edge, or right-click the grip for Move To, and it stays there for every PDF until you move it again; double-click the grip to put it back. In a narrow column it drops − and + first, then ‹ and ›, but never the page number or the zoom.
• 📖Page layouts. Page Layout, at the foot of the zoom menu, offers Single Page, Continuous, Two Pages and Two Pages, Continuous, and Cover Page Separately for the two-page layouts, which pairs pages 2–3, 4–5 as a printed book does. In two pages the page number reads as the spread, "6–7", and ⌥← and ⌥→ turn a whole spread. The layout is remembered.
• 📖The keys follow the pages. Click into the pages and ⌘+, ⌘− and ⌘0 zoom the PDF — View ▸ Text Size reads Zoom then — and go back to the app's text size once you click into the file pane or the sidebar. With a PDF open, the Text menu's ⌃⌘1, ⌃⌘2 and ⌃⌘3 are Fit Page, Fit Width and Actual Size, with Zoom In and Zoom Out under them, and ⌃⌘L is Go to Page…. ⌘C copies the text you have selected, and ⌘A selects the text of the page on screen — the spread, in a two-page layout.
• 📖Find in a PDF. ⌘F, or Find in the header, opens a find card in the top-right corner of the pages; the capsule steps aside if it is there. Matches are tinted on the pages, a phrase broken across two lines is still found, and so is a word hyphenated at a line end, and case and accents are ignored. ⌘G and ⇧⌘G step through them, ⌘E searches for what you have selected, and Esc puts the card away. A PDF is searched a page at a time, so a long one's count says "so far" until every page has been read, and Waiting for other PDF work… while a duplicate scan or other PDF work is ahead of it. A scanned PDF says This PDF has no text to search.

PDF Tools: every one writes a new copy

• 🔧A Tools menu over the PDF, and the same items in File ▸ PDF Tools: rotate the selected pages or all of them, Extract Pages…, Delete Pages…, Compress…, Clean Metadata…, and Protect with Password… or Remove Password…. Compress offers Best Quality, Balanced and Smallest File, or a size to come in under, and redraws every page as a picture, so the copy's text can't be selected.
• 🔧The original is never written to. Each tool writes a copy beside it that says what was done — "Statement (compressed).pdf", "(rotated)", "(pages removed)", "(metadata cleaned)", "(protected)", "(unlocked)", and for Extract the pages taken, "(pages 2–4)" — and never replaces a file already there. A banner says what was written, with Open in Edit and Reveal in Browse. A PDF locked with a password offers only Remove Password. A copy keeps the file's page labels, attached files and the way it opens; most tools leave out its tags for screen readers, layers and colour output intent, and their sheets say so when the file has any.
• 🔧Pick pages, and put them in a new order. In the Pages tab, click, ⌘-click and ⇧-click select pages and ⌘A selects them all; right-click a selection to rotate, delete or extract just those pages. Drag a page to a new place, and nothing is written until Save Reordered Copy; Reset Page Order puts them back. Rotating or deleting with a new order pending writes one copy that does both — "(reordered, rotated)". Closing the PDF, opening another file or quitting with an unsaved order or a tool still running asks first.
• 🔧PDF Tools in every file pane. Right-click a PDF in Browse, either Compare pane, Organize's pane or Edit's own for a PDF Tools submenu: Rotate All Pages, Compress…, Clean Metadata…, and Protect with Password… or Remove Password…, with the same sheets and copy names. Select several PDFs to rotate, compress or clean them as a batch: one sheet sets the options, the files go one at a time, a file that cannot be done is skipped with its reason, Cancel keeps the copies already written, and Reveal in Browse selects the new copies. File ▸ PDF Tools holds the same submenu for the focused pane's selection — "PDF Tools · 3 files" for several — whenever Edit is not showing a PDF.
• 🔧Save as PDF from a file's right-click menu. A Word, Excel or PowerPoint file, an RTF, a Markdown note or a .txt gets Save as PDF, where a PDF gets PDF Tools: the PDF is written beside it under its name — "Lease.docx" becomes "Lease.pdf", or "Lease 2.pdf" when that is taken — and the file itself is never changed. Markdown and text come out as the pages Edit's Print makes; Word, Excel and PowerPoint as macOS draws them in Quick Look, every sheet in turn and each slide on a page of its own, with their text selectable. A slide that is a picture has its words read by text recognition, so it can be searched too — every slide of a deck or only some — and the banner says so, and that a word may be misread. Select several for Save as PDF · 3 files: one at a time, with Stop, and a file that cannot be read is named in the banner. A folder you can't write to asks where. File ▸ Save as PDF does the same for the focused pane's selection.

Fill & Sign

• ✍Fill & Sign, in the PDF's header, floats a palette of tools at the left of the page, and the page stays where it was: Select, Text, Replace, Date — today, in your Mac's short format with a four-digit year — Marks for ✓, ✗ and •, Signature and Initials, then Aa, Text Size and Ink. A tool with a small triangle opens its choices beside it. The palette moves like the page capsule: drag its grip to any edge or corner, or right-click its grip for Move To, and it stays where you put it. Drag what you placed to move it, pull its corner handle to resize it, press Delete to remove it, and double-click text to change it; Aa, Text Size and Ink change the selected item, and ⌘Z undoes. Aa sets text's font — Sans, Serif, Rounded, Mono or Handwritten, each shown in itself — a typed signature's face or a drawn one's pen; right-click an item for the same choices.
• ✍Signatures stay on this Mac. Add Signature… types one in one of seven of the Mac's handwriting faces, each shown in your own name, or draws one with the trackpad or mouse — Fine, Medium or Bold, with Smooth out wobble, on to begin with, evening out the trackpad's jitter, and Undo Stroke (⌘Z) taking back the last stroke. Blue or Black ink is chosen in the sheet, on a pad that stays paper-white in Dark Mode. Typing a signature while no initials are saved can save matching initials with it. Restyling a saved signature on the page changes the saved one too. It is a picture of your signature, not a certificate-based digital one, and a saved one is kept on this Mac only — never synced, never written to the log.
• ✍A PDF's own form fields. A form with fields — a W-9, a visa form — opens Fill & Sign on Form Fields: type into text fields, set checkboxes and radio buttons, choose from pop-ups and lists, and Tab and ⇧Tab move through them in the form's own order. Click a signature field to sign it, and the signature fits the field. A field that takes no value is tinted grey and says why when you point at it. Text, dates, marks and signatures are still there for what the form has no field for.
• ✍Save Filled Copy writes a new copy — "Lease (signed).pdf", or "(filled)" with no signature or initials, or "(corrected)" with only corrections — and leaves the original as it was. A form stays fillable in the copy, in Preview, Chrome or Acrobat, with what you placed kept as annotations. Until you save, a pill at the top of the page counts what is unsaved, beside Discard, Save Filled Copy and Done, which puts Fill & Sign away, as Esc does with nothing chosen; closing the PDF, opening another file or quitting asks first. A form's caveats, and anything Save would refuse, sit in a note under the pill. File ▸ Fill & Sign and File ▸ Save Filled Copy do the same from the menu bar.
• ✍Fill & Sign by keyboard alone, and with VoiceOver. File ▸ Fill & Sign Tool holds the palette's tools, all but Aa. With one chosen, Return places its item in the middle of the page you can see, selected, for the arrow keys; text takes your typing at once, and Return again places another just below. Tab and ⇧Tab move through what you placed, after a form's fields, signature fields among them, where Space or Return opens the Signature menu, or Add Signature… with none saved. VoiceOver reads every placed item and every field — a field by its form's own description — presses each one that takes a value, and tells saved drawn signatures apart by number and pen. Add Signature… opens on Type, and deleting a saved signature asks first.
• ✍Replace retypes a few words on a page. Choose Replace in the palette and click a line of words, or drag across some, or select words and right-click for Replace Text…. A box opens over them, holding them, in their size and colour, and in their own font when your Mac has it; the line under it says "Same font" or names the stand-in. Return places the correction, Esc leaves the page as it was. Save Corrected Copy writes "(corrected)": the new words are drawn over a patch in the page's colour. The old words are still in the copy under the patch, where search and copy find them; the note under the pill says so and offers to make that page a picture, which takes them out, with the rest of that page's text. Replace says why when it can't: a page with no text, words on two lines, words that don't run across the page, a page whose text doesn't sit where it is printed, and any PDF with a fillable form.
• ✍A PDF whose owner allows no comments, and that has no form field you may fill, gets no Fill & Sign, and says why — File ▸ Fill & Sign is greyed with This PDF doesn’t allow filling under it, and the Fill & Sign button gives the reason, with Remove Password… to write a copy without the restrictions. A form that allows filling but not adding to its pages fills its fields only.

The rest of Edit

• 📝Recent files and New Note. Once you have opened a file in Edit, its page with nothing open lists the last ten files you opened there — text files and PDFs, through any door — with each one's folder and when you opened it, and a New Note button that does what ⌘N does. A click opens a file again and takes the file pane to its folder; right-click a row for Remove from Recents. A file that was deleted, or is on a disk that is not connected, is left off until it is back, and a file moved while open is followed. File ▸ Open Recent holds the same list in every workspace, with Clear Menu. A file dragged from Finder onto that page opens as Finder's Open With opens it; before, the drop did nothing.
• 📝One strip for Edit's side column. The Files list can now fold on its own, into the strip at the left edge, and starts folded; before, it went only when the file pane took its place, or under Expand, which hid the sidebar too. The strip has a button for the file pane and one for each tab the list shows — Files, and Outline for a Markdown note; Files, Pages and, with two or more bookmarks, Outline for a PDF — and each opens its column or folds it, lit while it shows. View ▸ File List (⌃⌘T) does the same.
• 📝The file pane and the list share one width, dragged at the column's edge, from 232 to 480 points. At its default width the file pane shows one column at a time, with a back button.
• 📝The folder line is a menu. The folder's name, on the line under the Files list's tabs, opens a menu: the folders inside it on top, then each folder above it up to the top of the source, in Finder's path-menu order. A pick takes the file pane there, and the list follows. It lists up to 40 subfolders, then Show All, with the folder's count — "Show All 52 in the File Pane" — which opens the pane on that folder.
• 📝Search inside files. The Files list's filter gains Names | Contents under its field. On Contents, type a word of two letters or more: the text files in the folder and the folders inside it list their matching lines, each with the word lit, and below them Spotlight lists the PDFs, Word and PowerPoint files that contain it — whole words and the starts of words. Click a line and the file opens with the word selected there and Find holding it, so ⌘G goes on to the next; a PDF opens with its find searching for the word, and a Word or PowerPoint file opens in Quick Look. A file not downloaded is never downloaded to be searched; it and files over 4.2 MB are skipped, and the line above the results counts them. Hidden files and folders, packages and binary files are passed over too.
• 📝Edit's sidebar has a switch of its own, off to begin with: ⌃⌘S in Edit no longer shows or hides the sidebar in Browse, Compare and Organize.
• 📝Find Previous. Text ▸ Find Previous (⇧⌘G) steps back through the find bar's matches, in a text file as in a PDF.
• 📝Typewriter Scrolling. Text ▸ Typewriter Scrolling, off to begin with, keeps the line you are typing at mid-height in Source — arrow keys, Return, Go to Line and the end of the file too. A click, the trackpad and a Find match scroll as before.
• 📝Paper. A switch beside Autosave under the file name, and Text ▸ Paper Background, put Source's text on paper — white in Light Mode, dark grey in Dark Mode — and leave the window around it as it was. With Readable Line Length on, the paper is only the centred column and its margins; with Typewriter Scrolling on, it runs on into the room below the last line. Off to begin with, remembered, and greyed in Preview, which keeps its own look. In a column too narrow for it, the switch steps aside and Text ▸ Paper Background is the way to it.
• 📝Words on Edit's header buttons. A text file's ＋, magnifying glass and × now read New Text File, Find and Close, and in a narrow column they drop their words together, before the name is cut. The "…" in the folder line under the name opens the whole path, the file's own folder first and ticked; before, it listed only the folders it hid. The save words on that line act too: "unsaved — ⌘S" saves, "not saving — couldn’t write" tries again and gives its reason when you point at it, and "not saving — no longer on disk" is Save Again; before, only "not saving — changed on disk" did anything. VoiceOver reads each by its words.
• 📝Tooltips name their keys. Point at Find, Source, Preview, Split, Go to Line, the find card's arrows or the PDF capsule's page and zoom buttons, and the tooltip gives the shortcut too.
• 📝The Files list by keyboard and menu. Tab into the Files or Outline list and the arrow keys move through it, Return opens and Space Quick Looks a file; Esc there, or in the Pages tab with no page selected, gives the keys back to the document. Return in the filter opens the first match, and a new folder clears the filter. A row's right-click menu adds Download for a file still in the cloud, and Rename and Delete, and the file name above the document offers the same menu. Under the reason Edit gives for a file it can't open are Quick Look and Reveal in Finder, after Download for a file still in the cloud and Try Again for one that kept changing while it was read. Reveal in Browse is greyed, saying why, for a file outside the source Browse shows.
• 📝Edit in its own words. A file Edit won't open says why in Edit's words — This isn’t a text file, so Edit can’t open it. — and the first change to a Windows (CRLF) file says Converted to LF line endings — ⌘Z undoes. A typed name such as "Notes v1.2" gets .md, Markup's Link… is Link, Undo after a Markup verb in Source names it — "Undo Bold" — and File ▸ Export as PDF… names the file it exports. A save that was written but couldn't be read back to check it is a warning now, not a failure.
• 📝One set of answers when a file changed on disk. The banner and the ⌘S alert both offer Compare…, Use Disk Version and Keep Mine…, in that order, and the comparison Compare… opens ends with the last two. Keep Mine… always asks before replacing the version on disk; the comparison's Save Anyway used to write without asking. Its column for your version is headed "In Edit". For a file that is gone, the ⌘S alert offers the banner's Save Again in place of Save Anyway: it makes the file's folder again if that went too, and writes nothing over a file that turned up there meanwhile, which Save Anyway did not do.
• 📝Leaving a deleted file asks first, even with nothing typed, since the text on screen may be the only copy; before, it was dropped without a word. Closing it, opening another file or ⌘N asks Save “Notes.md” again?, and quitting asks before it goes. A file still in the Trash is not asked about. The question about unsaved changes reads Save your changes to “Notes.md”? wherever it comes from — no longer "before closing it" — and it and the quit alert say in a line why they ask; its Don't Save is marked as destructive.
• 📝⌘S on an unchanged file writes nothing. It used to write the file again, giving it a new date and a sync client a reason to upload it.
• 📝Smaller fixes in Edit. With the file pane folded, ⌘X, ⌘C, ⌘V and ⌘A outside the text no longer act on the hidden pane — ⌘C copied the open file. Double-click Split's divider to put it back in the middle. The Outline scrolls to keep the heading you are in in sight, and the status line's Show Outline in File List opens it from any layout. An image dropped or pasted into a note says, on the status line, what was saved and where. A save the disk refuses gives the reason — "No space left on device" — not the name of a hidden staging file. A link to a file still in the cloud is treated as that file: Edit and the preview say it isn't downloaded and offer Download, where both downloaded it unasked, and PDF Tools doesn't download it either. A link to a text file over Edit's limit is refused as too large.
• 📝Help, menus and keys catch up with Edit. ⌘? opens Help at the page for the workspace you are in, not at setup — and, with a PDF open, at a new page, Read, fill and sign a PDF, which holds what Edit's page said about PDFs. Holding ⌥ shows the keys on the format bar, Source, Preview and Split, Go to Line, the PDF's page, zoom and find buttons, the empty page's buttons and the comparison's Cancel. View ▸ Preview is now View ▸ File Preview, so Text ▸ Preview is the only Preview. ⌘K finds Edit by "pdf", "sign" or "fill"; Voice Control answers to "Click Find", "Click Tools" and "Click Close"; and Help's search finds "doesn’t" when you type "doesn't".
• 📝Ticking a box in Preview is quick in a long note. With Edit in Preview off, or in a note over 256 KB, a tick rewrote and compared the whole note; it now changes only its own line. The last task in a 200 KB note went from 35 ms to 0.2 ms, and in a 4 MiB note from 808 ms to 3.7 ms.

Unified is one box

• 🎨One outline round the window. Unified — Settings ▸ Appearance ▸ Content surface — drew each area as its own box, a gutter apart, so it read as Cards drawn with hairlines. It now draws one outlined region round everything under the toolbar, with a hairline wherever two areas meet: the sidebar, the inspector, the panes, Compare's Differences, and Edit's strip, list and document. Cards is unchanged.
• 🎨Organize and Compare's Differences follow the same rule. Every Organize section, Storage included, and Compare's Differences area kept their Cards shape in Unified — a header box and a content box a gutter apart — so switching styles changed the panes and not the area beside them. Each column with a header over content now draws it one way: a card per section in Cards, a hairline under the header in Unified.
• 🎨Organize's header lines up with the pane's. With the pane showing a tab strip — two tabs, or View ▸ Tab Bar — the header of the Organize section beside it sat one strip higher than the pane's. It now lines up, in both styles and at every text size.

Your accent colour, everywhere

• 🎨The accent colour reaches the whole app. With an Accent color other than None in Settings ▸ Appearance, Settings' text-size tiles, Help, the guided setup, hover highlights, the Go to list's selected row, Compare Copies' swipe divider and every filled button draw in it; before, they kept the Mac's own accent. Filled buttons and Edit's lit controls use a deeper shade of it, so a white label on them stays readable — filled buttons at None too.

Recents, Revisited, Frequent

• 🔁Recents can show the folders you come back to, or the ones you use most. Point at the Recents heading in the sidebar and an icon appears beside the arrow; each click moves the heading on — Recents, then Revisited, folders you spent a few seconds in on two or more different days, newest first, then Frequent, the folders you have stayed in most often, most first. Folders you only clicked through, or passed with Back and Forward, do not count, and coming back within five minutes is the same visit. Both look back 90 days and count older visits for less, so a folder you have stopped using drops off. At most eight rows. The icon stays lit in the accent outside plain Recents, and the choice is remembered across launches. Both lists start empty and fill from visits made after the update. Recents lists the same folders as before, now each with its source's name, and the folders ⌘K offers are unchanged.

Around the app

• ⚙Tooltips come sooner, and more controls have one. A tooltip now shows after 0.3 seconds rather than the Mac's 1.5, and controls that had none — a search field's ✕ and a banner's ✕ among them — now say what they do.
• ⚙The document survey's Resume now and Start over do what they say. Resume now, offered while reading waits on a scan, a file copy, a Mac running hot or Low Power Mode, left the survey paused until that cleared by itself; it now reads on past what was holding it, and anything new still pauses it. Start over resumed instead of starting over; it now asks first, then reads every document again. The line on every Organize lens no longer offers a Stop that did nothing for an interrupted survey — it offers Resume, and says Resume now where the card does.

Edit gets a format bar, tables, and lists that carry on

• ✎A format bar above the text. In a Markdown note, Source — and Split's Source half — now has a bar of the Markup verbs, a capsule to each group: the Body menu, which names the style the caret is in and shows each style as it looks; B, I and S; the lists; Code, Code Block and Quote; and Link, Table and Divider. A button is lit when pressing it would take that formatting off. Where there is room each button carries a word beside its icon; a narrower window drops the words, then folds the groups one by one, and keeps Bold, Italic and Strikethrough to the last. Right-click the bar for Icon and Text, Icon Only or Hide Format Bar. View ▸ Format Bar turns it back on, as does the same item on the text's own right-click menu.
• ✎Tables without typing pipes. Markup has a Table submenu, and the bar a Table button: Insert Table, Make Table from Selection (tab- or comma-separated lines), add and delete rows and columns, and Format Table, which lines the columns up. With the caret in a table, a Table capsule appears on the bar. An edit keeps a table's style: one written lined up stays lined up, and one typed by hand changes only in the row or column you touched, so a synced file shows a one-line change.
• ✎Lists carry on. Return at the end of a list item starts the next one — the same bullet, the next number, or an empty box after a task — and one ⌘Z takes back the Return and the marker together. Return on an empty item ends the list. Tab and ⇧Tab move an item in and out a level. Text ▸ Continue Lists turns this off. Return and Tab follow the same rules in Preview, and ⇧Return or ⌃Return writes a plain line break.
• ✎Bullets, Numbered, Tasks, the headings and Quote work on a blank line. On an empty line or in an empty note they did nothing; they now start the item, with the caret after its marker, and a numbered item carries on from the one above. Pressed again, the marker comes off.
• ✎Paste an address over words to link them. Pasting one http or https address over selected words makes [words](address). Every other paste is unchanged.
• ✎Drop a picture into a note. An image dropped from Finder, or pasted, is copied into an Images folder beside the note as <note>-1.png and so on, and linked on a line of its own. An existing file is never replaced, and ⌘Z takes the link back but leaves the copy. JPEG, HEIC, GIF and WebP pictures keep their format, and a drop or paste whose pictures total more than 25 MB is refused before anything is copied.
• ✎Horizontal Rule is now Divider, in the Markup menu, the bar and the right-click menu.
• ✎Each Markup verb is its own undo step. A verb used straight after typing was undone together with the typing: type "foo", choose Bold, and one ⌘Z took both back. Now it takes back the verb.
• ✎The Markup verbs write only where they belong. A line verb leaves code blocks, front matter and dividers alone and finds nested, indented and quoted markers; Italic over bold keeps the bold; an inline style never takes in a line break or a trailing space; and undoing a verb gives back its selection. Markup is greyed in files that are not Markdown.
• ✎Bold, Strikethrough and Inline Code no longer turn two spans inside out. Over a selection reaching from one bold word into another, Bold read the two as one span and turned them inside out; it now adds a pair.

Type in Preview — experimental

• ✎A Markdown note's Preview can be typed in. Fix a word, add a sentence, press Return for a new paragraph or list item, tick a box, change a table cell: each change is written to the Markdown as you type, and ⌘Z undoes it, a run of typing at a time, as in Source. The format bar, the Markup menu and ⌘F work there too. In Split both halves can be typed in, and scrolling either one moves the other.
• ✎It is on unless you turn it off — with Edit in the top-right corner of Preview, or Text ▸ Edit in Preview (Experimental). It is marked experimental, and the first time a Preview becomes editable a note says what that means.
• ✎It never guesses. A change Preview cannot make faithfully — joining two paragraphs, say — is not made: the file is left as it was, and the line under the document says That change needs Source., with Show in Source beside it. Markdown files only, and a note longer than 256 KB stays read-only in Preview.

Edit around the document

• 📝Expand gives the document the window. "Just the text" was a ≡ that read as "justify", with no menu item or key. It is now Expand, a button of its own at the end of the header, and Text ▸ Expand (⌃⌘E). It folds the file pane, the Text Files list and the sidebar, and leaving puts back exactly what was showing.
• 📝The sidebar works beside a folded pane. In Edit the sidebar (⌃⌘S) existed only while the file pane was open, and the pane starts folded, so the switch was greyed most of the time. It now stays, and a click in it still re-points the Text Files list.
• 📝The status line names the heading you are in. In a Markdown note with headings it starts "in Heading ▾", and its menu lists every heading to jump to.
• 📝It counts the selection — "12 of 78 words", "64 characters selected" — and goes to a line: click "Line, Col", or Text ▸ Go to Line… (⌃⌘L), and type a line or line:column.
• 📝Readable Line Length. Text ▸ Readable Line Length keeps wrapped text in a centred column as wide as Preview's, so a wide window no longer runs a paragraph 150 characters across. Off by default; also on the text's right-click menu, beside Wrap Lines.
• 📝Edit notices when its file changes elsewhere. It learned only at the next save, so a note showed stale text, and one moved away was written back at its old path. Now, with nothing unsaved, the new version loads quietly and the caret stays put. With unsaved typing, a banner offers Compare, Keep Mine and Use the Disk's, and holds autosave until you choose. A moved or renamed file is followed, and a deleted one keeps its text, with Save Again to write it back.
• 📝Edit writes plain LF line breaks only. In a file with Windows (CRLF) or old-Mac (CR) line breaks, Return, the list and block verbs, and a multi-line paste wrote LF breaks in among the old ones, and the status line read "Mixed". Now the first edit converts the whole file to LF, inside that edit's undo step, so one ⌘Z gives back the file exactly as it was opened. A file you only read is never touched.
• 📝⌘Z in Edit undoes your typing, never a file operation. In the find field, or right after switching between Source, Split and Preview, ⌘Z could undo your last file move, copy or rename instead. Now, whenever the document, Preview or the find bar was the last thing used, ⌘Z takes back text; file operations are undone from the file pane.
• 📝⌘Z is saved. An undo put the old text back on screen while the document — and so autosave and the unsaved dot — kept the undone version. After switching between Source, Split and Preview, ⌘Z could also undo a view that was no longer showing and use up the step. Both are fixed, and a box ticked in Preview can be undone.

Opening files into Edit

• 📄SyncCloud is in Finder's Open With for text files. A file opened that way, dropped on the Dock icon or passed to open -a lands in Edit, fetched first if it is still in the cloud. SyncCloud is offered, never made the default. Opening several files at once opens the first and gives each other folder a tab, its files selected. A launch from Finder opens in Expand.
• 📄The file pane follows the file you open, by tab. Opening a file from ⌘O, the Info inspector, a duplicate or the palette switches to the tab already showing its folder, or opens a new tab there, on whichever source holds it — instead of re-rooting the tab you were in. From Compare and Organize it moves only within the pane's own source, so your comparison and Organize's results stay put.
• 📄⌘N makes its file in Notes when the pane's folder is no place for one. On a whole-disk source it offered the top of the disk or /Applications, and with no folder open it was greyed. A system folder, the top of the home folder, a Trash, a folder you cannot write to, or none, now sends the new file to ~/Documents/Notes, made if it is missing.

Compare: faster after a switch, and right about linked folders

• ⚡Compare after a switch reuses what a pane already read. Switching a pane's source or tab emptied every cached folder walk, so the next Compare read both folders from disk: Home against Dropbox's Documents took 4–6 seconds instead of under 2. The other pane's walk is now kept, and the scan's status dates the comparison by the walks it read rather than by when it ran.
• ⚡The differences come out faster. Every file present on one side only got a full row built, then most were folded into their folder's row. Now only the rows that survive are built: on a Home scan of about 200,000 entries against 13,766, that step went from about 1.06 s to 0.35 s.
• ⚡iCloud Drive's Documents and Desktop compare as what they hold. With a pane on iCloud Drive ▸ Documents, the scan read the link instead of the folder, found nothing, and reported every item on the other side as "Folder missing on left" — 15 such rows on every iCloud-against-Dropbox launch. At the iCloud Drive container itself, rows could offer to copy into a path spelled <other side>/Users/…. Both read through the link now.
• ⚡Folders reached through a link behave like any other. Below a folder symlink, under a root reached through one (such as /var), and above iCloud's linked Documents: Compare only this folder and Open no longer refuse with "Can't Focus Folder"; Columns opens the next column instead of showing it empty; a file saved there from Edit, ⌘N or Export as PDF now refreshes the pane and Compare; and a Compare of Home against a mirror no longer offers to copy the mirror's folder back into the iCloud container, through the link, onto ~/Documents.
• ⚡A cloud folder that never answers no longer stalls Compare — or anything else. With OneDrive not running, its Trash folders block anything that lists them, so a Compare of Home never finished, and each Refresh left another stuck reader behind. Such a folder is now given 5 seconds, then marked unexplored, and Compare runs without it — reporting nothing under it as missing. The same limit now covers every other place that lists a folder: the destination picker, undoing a rename or move, merging folders, Look for Names, Edit's Text Files list and the sidebar's folder sizes.
• ⚡Rows stay inside their folder's row. Compare folds everything inside a folder missing on one side into that folder's row. A name beginning with an accent mark, or a folder and a file whose names differ only by an invisible trailing space, let rows escape: copying one could make a second folder beside the first, and bulk sync could handle it twice.

The panes: one busy indicator, and columns at their own width

• ☰A pane reading its folder shows one busy indicator, a labelled chip in its bottom-right corner, instead of up to three spinners at once — one in the middle, one in the corner, and one in every empty column. A column spins only while it alone is waiting for its listing.
• ☰Compare no longer flashes "Scanning" on a quick rescan. Most rescans take well under half a second, and each flashed the scanning card, the count and the Stop button. They now appear only once a scan has run for three quarters of a second.
• ☰A Columns pane at rest shows its column at its own width, with empty space after it, as Finder does. It used to span the whole pane and then snap back on the first click, resizing the column under the pointer. The empty space has the column's right-click menu.

Organize acts only on the folder its profile was built from

• ⚙︎Refresh what's learned reads the profile's own folder. It read whatever folder the focused pane showed. With the left pane on Home, one click would have rebuilt your ~/Documents filing memory from your whole home folder. It now always surveys the profile's folder, and refuses a profile that records none or a folder that has been emptied.
• ⚙︎The first document survey and Restructure do the same. Started with the pane elsewhere, the survey spent hours on the wrong tree; Restructure, given a profile without a recorded folder, acted under your home folder. Both now refuse rather than guess.

Glass that moves

• 🎨In Frosted and Clear, the marker that shows your choice is a lens of glass that glides between choices — in segmented controls, tab strips, the Settings rail, the destination picker and the other places that mark one choice among several. On light glass the chosen label is black, where white all but vanished. Solid is unchanged.
• 🎨Bar and toolbar buttons get glass capsules, as Finder's do: the pane bar, the breadcrumb, the tab strip, the Compare, Organize and Edit headers, close buttons, the Activity Log and Sync History.

Smaller fixes

• ✓⌘K can no longer send the app into a spin. Once, the app sat at full CPU for seven minutes after ⌘K: an AppKit password-field check, which SyncCloud has no use for, was walking every focusable view in the window. That check is now switched off.
• ✓The tab chip's iCloud mark is drawn at its proper size. When a pane's tabs folded into one chip, the iCloud mark could draw as a large blue cloud across the top of the pane.
• ✓PDF previews in Columns open in the background. Each selected PDF was opened on the app's main thread, so stepping through a folder of them waited on every one; now the window stays responsive while the page loads. A damaged, empty or locked PDF shows its icon and says why, where the pane was blank.
• ✓Closing a document mid-search can no longer crash the app. Closing it while Find was still looking for its first match left AppKit's find highlight asking a freed text view to redraw.

The keyboard reaches the file panes

• ⇅Click a file, then use the arrow keys. ↑ and ↓ move the selection and ⇧↑ / ⇧↓ extend it a row at a time, in Columns and in Tree alike — in Browse, in both Compare panes and in Organize’s list. On macOS 27 a click selected the file but left the keyboard with the window, so every key pressed after it did nothing at all; ⇧-click or a drag was the only way to select a run of files. A click now hands that list the keyboard, and a caret you click into a field is left where it is. A right-click does the same, so the menu’s verbs and the arrow keys always mean the same list.
• ☰The differences list takes the keyboard too. Click a difference, wherever in the list, and the arrows and ⇧↑ / ⇧↓ work on that list. The review queue is deliberately unchanged: during a review the card keeps the keyboard, so ↩ and Skip go on working.

Columns gives names the row, and each column its own width

• ↔Names run to the end of the row. A file’s size no longer sits beside its name in Columns — Finder’s column view shows names alone, and Tree keeps the size and the date — and the room held back for things that were not there is gone, so a name runs up to its folder’s chevron or to the place a file’s ☁ appears. A name too long for its column is cut in the middle, keeping its start and its ending: a folder of “Statement - Account - January 2024.pdf”, “… - February 2024.pdf” reads as different months rather than as identical rows. A search hit is cut at the end away from its match, so the emboldened part stays in view. Tree’s rows gain the same room, up to their size and date.
• ⌂The ⌂ badge is gone from the rows. It marked every file and folder outside your cloud folders, which in a Home folder was nearly every row. The Info inspector’s Where it lives says it instead, and now says it for folders too: “This Mac only”, or “In” and the source’s name.
• ⇆Swiping sideways across the columns is smooth. Every visible row re-measured itself on every frame of a sideways swipe; each column now reads its rows’ positions from its own list. The action bar moves to the top when it would cover the selected row’s highlight — a few points sooner than when it reached the row’s text.
• ⚡Clicking is lighter in a big folder. Every visible row’s right-click menu is built along with the row, and on every click each one looked the selection up in the folder tree — in both panes. A row outside the selection now answers from itself, and the selection is looked up once for all the rows in it.
• ↺Switching workspace keeps your place. Browse, Organize, Edit and Compare each rebuild the pane, which put its columns back at the first one and every list back at its top. A pane in Columns now comes back scrolled as you left it — at the far end of the columns if that is where you were, even if the preview has opened or the window has narrowed since — and a folder opened again later in the session opens where you left it.
• 📁And its folder. Opening Organize moved the left pane to the top of its source, so the folder you were in was gone when you came back to Browse. It stays put now: the folder open in Browse is the one Organize’s file pane shows, and a folder you open there is the one Browse shows. With no scope chosen, Organize’s sections work on that folder, as they already did when you clicked to one inside Organize.
• ◫Size one column at a time. Drag a column’s edge and that column alone changes width; hold ⌥ to size every column together, the way dragging always worked. Settings ▸ Readability ▸ Column widths swaps the two — Each column or All columns — and choosing All columns puts every column back to one width. The deepest column has an edge of its own now, with a strip kept clear after it so the preview’s divider or the pane’s never covers it. Double-click an edge to fit the column to its longest name (⌥ fits them all), and Reset Column Widths, on the right-click menu of a column’s empty space, puts them all back. A column can be up to 600 points wide (it was 340), and is never drawn wider than its pane.

Getting a file into Edit

• ✎Four ways in from a file pane. A text file in a file pane can now be opened in Edit from four places: File ▸ Open in Edit, on ⌘O, for the text file selected in the focused pane; Open in Edit first in a file’s right-click menu, under Refresh, where it used to sit below Get Info and Reveal in Finder; an Edit button by the file’s name in the preview (⇧⌘P) — beside it, or under it when the name is long; and Open in Edit first among the Info inspector’s actions (⌘I). Until now the right-click menu was the only way, and it was easy to miss.
• ⇔Compare’s list of differences offers it too, once for each side. Right-click a row whose file is text and Open in Edit is offered for each copy there is, named for the pane it opens from: both panes’ copies when the file is on both sides, where the items sit under Compare…, and the one that exists when it is missing from a side, where it comes first. A folder, or a file Edit does not open, gets no such item. The list shown during a guided review offers it as well. It opens the file without moving the left pane, where every other way in takes the pane to the file’s folder: in Compare that pane is half of the comparison the list is showing, so moving it would re-run the comparison and forget what you had set aside with Ignore in Comparison. The folder name above the document says where the file lives; click it when you do want the pane there. Edit the file and go back to Compare, and the comparison runs again, so the row describes the file as you left it rather than offering to copy the old version over it.
• ✓Each one is offered for a text file and never for a folder — all six, those four and the rows in Compare’s differences and Duplicates’ copies, ask the question the right-click menu always asked, so they agree about what a text file is. The preview is the one that holds back further: for a file whose content is still in the cloud it goes on offering Download, because previewing that file is exactly what would start the download.
• ⌘⌘O was free, and it is the key most people try first. It is the only one of File’s row verbs with a key, and the ⌘/ shortcuts list shows it beside ⌘N.
• ↩And a way back out, from any file in Edit’s Text Files list. Right-click a file there for Reveal in Browse, Get Info, Reveal in Finder and Quick Look, each acting on the file you clicked rather than the one that is open. Until now the list had no right-click menu, and Reveal in Browse was offered only on the open file’s own name above the document. A file Edit will not open — too large, or still in the cloud — keeps the menu, since that is when you most want to see it somewhere else. Reveal in Browse leaves the open document as it was: ⌘4 comes back to it.
• ✎A duplicate that is a text file opens in Edit from its right-click menu. In Organize’s duplicates, right-click a copy’s row and Open in Edit comes first, above Compare with keeper — on every copy, the one being kept included, whose row had no right-click menu at all until now. A copy that is not a text file keeps the menu it had. Those rows also answer a right-click anywhere along them now, where some answered only over the file’s name and picture. Like the other ways in, it takes the left pane to the copy’s folder — so back in Organize the duplicates are still listed, and their Rescan button becomes Organize “‹folder›”, to point Organize at that folder instead.
• ℹThe Info inspector’s row of actions now wraps instead of squeezing. At the inspector’s usual width those buttons had been shrinking until their labels were a few letters and an ellipsis — “Reve…”, “Cop…” — and adding a fourth would have left two with no letters at all. Each one now keeps its whole name, taking a second line where it needs one.

Edit with fewer columns

• ▤Edit shows one list of files, never two. Open the source pane beside the document and the Text Files list steps aside: the pane is the list. Files Edit cannot open — a PDF, an image, a text file over its size limit — are dimmed there, with the reason as their tooltip, and a single click on a text file opens it, as does moving the selection to one with the arrow keys. Collapse the pane and the list comes back.
• ☰Just the text. A button beside Find, above the document, hides the Text Files list and folds the source pane if it was open, leaving the document alone in the window. It stays hidden until you ask for it back — the same button, or the new rung on the strip at the left edge — and the choice is remembered across launches.
• ⌘⌘N follows the list. With no list on screen, the new file’s name is typed at the top of the document instead, with the folder it will be created in named beside the field. Return creates and opens it; Escape puts it away.
• ⌘The file ⌘N makes shows up in the list, selected. With the source pane open, the new file appears in the folder it was created in and is selected there, the way a file you click is, so the list says where the document lives. A PDF you export into the folder is listed there too. The pane used to go on listing the folder as it was until something else re-read it.
• 📁The document says where it lives. Under its name, beside Autosave, the header now names the file’s folder. With the source pane open it reads “in Finance”: click it and the pane goes to that folder with the file selected. With the pane folded away it spells out the whole path the pane’s breadcrumb would show — “iCloud › Documents › Finance” — and each part is a place to go: the folded pane moves there, without opening, and the Text Files list follows it. Under Just the text, with neither on screen, the move shows when you bring the list or the pane back. A long path folds its middle first — the “…” lists the folders it hides, each a place to go — and keeps the source and the folder for as long as they fit, then the folder alone. A file in another of your sources, such as the right-hand copy opened from Compare’s list of differences, is named from that source — “in Dropbox › Backup” — as words, not places to go. The header is now as tall as the pane’s toolbar card beside it — a card of its own when the window draws cards — so the text starts level with the list, and it stays level when the pane shows its tabs. It stays with no document open, reading “No document open” and naming the folder a new file would be made in — “iCloud” at the top of iCloud Drive — so the page does not move when a file opens.
• ➤The file you open is selected in the source pane, and scrolled into view. Open a file from the Text Files list, from any Open in Edit, with ⌘N or from the folder name above the document, and the pane selects it where it lives and brings it on screen — the 140th file of a long folder as much as the first, in Columns and in the list view. Reveal in Browse lands with the file selected too. It happens as the file is opened and not afterwards: a file you then select yourself, a folder you move the pane to, and a set of several files you have selected in the pane are all left as you made them — and so is every other workspace: move to one before the pane has listed the file, and nothing is selected there behind you. Like a click in the pane, it lets go of whatever is selected in the other one, so the two never both hold a selection. With the pane folded away the file is selected in it all the same, and brought into view when you open the pane — once: scroll away from it and the pane stays where you put it. Compare’s list of differences leaves the pane where it is, so there the file is selected only if the pane is already showing its folder. Until now opening a file selected nothing in the pane, and nothing outside a search scrolled a selected file into view.

New and Close, above the document

• ＋A ＋ above the document makes a new text file. It sits beside Find and does exactly what ⌘N does — it opens the name field, in the folder its tooltip names — in every layout: with the source pane open, with the Text Files list showing, and under Just the text. The Text Files list keeps its own ＋; this one stays on screen when the list steps aside.
• ×A × at the other end of that row closes the document, and so does the new File ▸ Close Document. There was no way to put a document away before: it stayed open until another replaced it. Closing saves the way leaving a file always does and asks only when autosave is off for the file or cannot write it — Cancel keeps the file open — then leaves Edit’s empty page, whose header stays with its ＋ in it, and the folder, the file pane and Just the text as they were. Clicking the same file in the pane opens it again. Close Document has no key: ⌘W closes the tab, as it always has.
• ✎A long file name keeps its letters before Source, Preview and Split keep their words. With the ＋ and × in the row, those three now show their words only when the whole name fits beside them, and are just their icons otherwise — the names stay in their tooltips.

Folders merge, and Cancel stops the copy it is in

• ⊞A folder that already exists at the destination can be merged, and Merge is the default. When a copy or move lands a folder onto one of the same name, the alert used to offer Replace, Keep Both or Skip — and Replace sent the whole existing folder to the Trash, including everything that was only in it. Merge keeps everything already there, adds what is missing, and asks about each file that is in both folders on its own. Its “Apply to all for remaining conflicts” covers the rest of that one merge, and a Conflicts setting other than “Ask every time” answers those files the way it answers any other. Folders inside the two are merged as well, without asking.
• #The alert counts what each answer would do before you choose — how many items Replace would send to the Trash, and how many Merge would ask about. On folders too large to count quickly it says the same thing without numbers rather than guessing.
• ↶A move merge tidies up after itself. The source folder goes to the Trash once everything in it has moved, and stays where it was if you skipped anything inside it. One ⌘Z takes the whole merge back.
• ⇄Merge is offered for copies and moves between panes, Copy to… / Move to…, and paste. It is not offered through a folder that is really a symlink, nor for a package — an app, a photo library, or a document your Mac shows as a single file is one item, and merging two of them would build a document neither app wrote — and not yet in Compare’s single-row or bulk sync, whose prompts are unchanged.
• ■Cancel stops the item that is copying, not just the ones after it. One very large file or folder used to run to the end once it had started, however long that took. It now stops mid-file, and nothing half-copied is left at the destination, because the copy is written under a hidden temporary name and removed when abandoned. A cancel is not reported as a failure. This applies to bulk sync as well.
• ⌛The progress window shows how far a slow copy has got, on the item’s own line — “Archive.zip — 4.2 GB of 12.8 GB · about 2 min left” — once it has been copying for a second, with the time left from the third (a folder shows only how much has been copied). It stays off for a bulk sync, where several copies share the line.

Setting up is a guided sheet

• 📋Ten screens instead of a five-step form — Welcome, Locations, Learn, You, People, Countries, Structure, Workspaces, Appearance and Summary. Five of them ask something; the rest confirm, show or offer. The order is the change: SyncCloud reads your folder before it asks about you, so the questions after it are asked with your own folder names in front of you. That reading is names and counts only — no document is opened at that stage.
• 🏠A screen that shows what it found. Structure draws the tree SyncCloud read with its reading of each folder beside it — “a year”, “files go here”, “inbox: nothing will be filed here” — and a second view placing the loose files at the top of your folder where To File would put them. It is on screen before the profile is written, so going back to fix a name, a country or the folder itself costs nothing.
• 💾The folder profile is not written until you press Save. It is built in memory and rebuilt whenever you change an answer, so Back from Structure leaves no profile on disk. Your other answers are kept as you leave each screen.
• 🌎The likely countries arrive ticked, and “likely” is measured. A short folder name pre-ticks only when it is a two-letter country code and it splits five or more different parent folders — the bar the reference tree set. PRD never pre-ticks, because it is not a country code, and a three-letter code such as USA is offered for you to tick by hand. IT is Italy to that check, so a tree with an IT department in five places arrives with it ticked, and you untick it.
• 👤The name question asks for the forms, not the name. Surname-first is its own suggestion because the matcher is positional; initials are offered and left unticked; an accented name is offered in both spellings. The surname builds the forms and is not saved on its own.
• AThe text-size control is on every screen, so somebody who needs bigger text can get it on screen 1 rather than screen 9. It steps through all ten sizes, the same stops View ▸ Text Size reaches.
• ⏱Setup no longer estimates how long it takes. The only duration it quotes is the document read’s “About 3 h for N documents” — a coarse figure over a real count — and that read is work you choose.

Reading documents says so wherever you are

• 📖A line under Organize’s header on every lens while documents are being read, with Pause and Stop on it. The card that offers the read lives on one lens; a three-hour background job needed to be visible from the other five.

Settings

• ⚙General has “Run setup again…” and Advanced has “Reset setup…”, which forgets that setup has run so it offers itself again on the next launch. The Reset All Settings alert now says the same thing about itself.

Fixes

• ⌘The ⌘/ shortcuts list no longer offers ⌘-double-click. Its Tabs group went on saying that ⌘-double-clicking a folder opens it in a new tab for the whole of v5.3, which had taken that gesture out so that ⌘-click and ⇧-click could select in Columns. The row is gone. To open a folder in a new tab, right-click it, or select it and choose File ▸ Open in New Tab.
• 🔧A Mac that had never learned a folder tree could not learn one. The app only told its engine where profiles live after finding a profile there, so on a fresh install the first walk refused with “no profiles directory was configured” before reading a single folder. Found by rehearsing a first run with the profiles directory moved aside.
• 🔧Organize’s Help page said six sections and listed five — Storage was missing from the list, and two more sentences on the page agreed with the wrong number.
• ⚡Switching files in Edit is quicker on a large document. Every switch fingerprints the outgoing text so that its undo history is refused rather than replayed if the file has changed, and the fingerprint hashed the text character by character: 138 ms on a 4 MB file, the largest Edit opens. It hashes the bytes now, in 12 ms.

Edit gets its menus

• ☰Two new menus, Text and Markup, after Organize. Edit’s whole menu-bar presence was New Text File… and Save. Both menus grey out unless Edit is on screen with a document open, the way Compare’s items follow a comparison. In Preview the Markup verbs and the two find items grey too, because the rendered page has no text to select in.
• 👁Text is about the document as a whole. Source, Preview and Split on ⌃⌘1, ⌃⌘2 and ⌃⌘3, ticked for the one showing and greyed for a file with nothing to preview; Find Next ⌘G and Use Selection for Find ⌘E, which the find bar had and nothing answered; the Wrap Lines and Check Spelling While Typing switches; and Autosave This File, the header’s switch as a menu item.
• ✎Markup is the right-click menu’s verb list, with keys. Bold ⌘B, Italic ⌘I, Strikethrough ⇧⌘X, Inline Code ⇧⌘K, Link… ⇧⌘L, then the headings, lists, quote, code block and rule with no keys — ⌘1 through ⌘4 are the workspaces, and nothing this app registers may use ⌥. The right-click menu shows the same five keys now, because they work.
• ⌘⌘I is Italic in the text and the Info inspector everywhere else. One key, two jobs, decided by where the caret is when you press it. In the Go to field, the rename row, a pane’s search box, the find bar’s own field, or anywhere outside Edit, it shows or hides the inspector as it always has — and the five Markup keys never edit the document from a field you are typing in.

Seeing what changed, before choosing which version wins

• ✎The alert about a file that changed under you gains “Show What Changed…”. When a document moves on disk while it is open, autosave stops and an alert asks Save Anyway, Reload from Disk or Cancel — a question about a difference the person answering has never seen. The new button opens an in-window overlay that diffs what you have against what arrived, with the same three verbs at its foot, so the decision is made looking at it.
• ▤Both sides are selectable, because the common case is one changed line on each side, where “which version wins” is the wrong question and a merge by hand is the honest answer. Left is your buffer, right is the disk.
• ⚠A file that is now too large, or no longer text, is refused with the reason rather than diffed, and a file that moved keeps its two-button alert — there is nothing at the path to read.
• 👁The header’s amber “not saving — changed on disk” is a second door onto the same overlay. Cancel leaves autosave stopped, and without that door the only way back to the question was ⌘S.

Browse gets a status bar

• ≡A line at the foot of the pane, on by default. How many items are in the tree, what your selection comes to, how much of the tree is still in the cloud, and when the listing was read. Deferred since v4.2 on what it would say in Compare, where two panes want two answers and one strip can only give one — so it ships where that question does not arise. View ▸ Status Bar turns it off; there is no key for it.
• ↔It sheds from the right as the pane narrows, keeping the item count longest: the freshness goes first, then the cloud-only count, then the selection. VoiceOver is never shed — it reads every fact at every width, and it is the one place a stale listing is described in words rather than by colour.
• ☁The cloud-only count reads — until it is true. It is one lstat per file over a tree that can hold forty thousand of them, so it is counted in the background after the rows are on screen, and the bar shows a dash rather than a number climbing towards the answer. Navigating, scanning or deleting starts it again, and the dash comes back with it.
• 🕑“Scanned N ago” is about the listing you are looking at, not about a comparison. Coming back to a folder you were in ten minutes ago says ten minutes, not “just now” — the age belongs to the walk that read the disk, and it survives being served from memory.

The preview works in the tree too

• ◫Selecting a file in a tree pane opens a preview beside it, the same Quick Look preview the Finder-style columns have had. The switch is the one that was already there — the pane header’s pill, ⇧⌘P, and Show Preview in the pane’s right-click menu — so the preference travels with the surface rather than with the way it happens to be listing files.
• ↔The rows give up the room, and only ever room they have. The preview is pinned to the pane’s trailing edge and the list reflows into what is left, so nothing is covered and nothing scrolls sideways. Drag the seam to resize it; the width is remembered, and is the same width the columns use. A pane too narrow for a legible list beside a preview shows none, and gets it back when you widen the pane.
• ≡View ▸ Preview Column is now View ▸ Preview, because it is no longer a column in one of the two views. Same key, same tick.
• 📄A PDF in the preview shows a whole page, and scrolls through the document. It used to be scaled to fit the preview’s width, so the wider you made the pane the more of the page fell below the fold — and no way to reach the rest. It is now fitted so the whole page is visible whichever way the pane is shaped, and scrolling walks the pages. Images and text are unchanged.

Walking the columns, and clicks that land

• ⌘⌘↓ opens the selected folder into a new column, ⌘↑ closes the rightmost one. Both are in the Go menu beside Back and Forward, as Open Selected Folder and Enclosing Folder. They move the column stack, which costs nothing and leaves every difference badge valid — not the comparison scope, which would reload the tree and re-run the scan. Both are dead in Tree view, which draws no columns.
• ↪⌘↑ is not a second spelling of ⌘[. ⌘[ pops the same stack and then keeps going, stepping the comparison scope back through the pane’s focus history. ⌘↑ stops at the root column and greys. Finder draws the same line between Back and Enclosing Folder.
• ☰Both hand the key back to the caret when you are typing — in a pane’s search box, a rename row, the ⌘K field or an open document, where the same two chords are the field editor’s move-to-start and move-to-end. ⌘↓ also refuses a row that is not in the deepest open column, since silently closing three columns is not what anybody pressing it is asking for.
• 🖱⌘-click and ⇧-click multi-select in Columns works now. Roughly one click in ten registered, on rows all over the list, with the main thread idle — a tap gesture on the row claimed the mouse-down and then, far more often than not, never completed, so the click never reached the table and the table selected nothing. Measured live rather than argued from the source: with the gesture on, 28 clicks produced 3 selections; with it off, 6 produced 6. Plain clicks always looked fine because they had a second committer, which is what made this read as a modifier-key problem for so long.
• ⚠The cost, decided rather than assumed: ⌘-double-click no longer opens a folder in a new tab. It stays on the row’s context menu and on ⌘T.

Three menu items that were missing

• 🔍View ▸ Text Size ▸ Bigger ⌘+ / Smaller ⌘− / Default Size ⌘0. The whole app’s type, from the keyboard, on the same stops as the Text size slider in Settings ▸ Readability and nothing between or beyond them — so the keyboard cannot reach a size Settings cannot. At either end the item greys.
• ☁File ▸ Download, for one selected file whose content is still in the cloud. The row’s right-click menu had it and the File menu, which carries the rest of the row’s verbs, did not. It asks iCloud to fetch the file exactly as the row does, and the badge clears when the content lands.
• 🕑Window ▸ Sync History was already there — every window is listed automatically — and the audit that proposed adding it had read the source rather than the menu. Left as it is: moving it beside Activity Log would remove the main window’s own entry from that menu, which is measured and pinned.

⌘K takes you to a path in another source

• ↪A typed path in a source the pane is not showing is delivered now, not refused. Go to Folder has taken /… and ~/… paths since v4.1, and one inside a different configured source answered “In Dropbox — switch source first” — a row that named the fix and then made you do it. It reads “Open in Dropbox”, and ↵ points the pane at that source and lands it on the folder. Only the pane ⌘K was aimed at moves; in Compare the one beside it keeps its source, its tree and its place.
• ⚠The other three refusals are still refusals, and each says something different: “Not in any source” is about your configuration rather than about the folder, “Backup SSD is not mounted” is a source that cannot be shown at all, and “No folder at that path” is the only one claiming nothing is there.
• ⏱A path in another source is not checked until you press ↵, so typing one never waits on a sleeping drive. If the folder has gone since, the pane stays where it is rather than switching source and landing somewhere else, and the Activity Log says so.

Print a document, or write it as a PDF

• 🖨⌘P prints what Preview shows. File ▸ Print… renders the open Markdown document the way Preview does — same headings, same type, same accent on links and quote bars — and hands the pages to the standard print panel. It prints the rendered document whichever mode you are looking at, because printing a Markdown file means the document rather than its markup.
• 📄File ▸ Export as PDF… writes those same pages to a file. It opens on the folder the rail is reading, with the document’s own name and .pdf in place of its extension, and the file is written the way every other file this app writes is — staged, flushed and swapped, never half written over a good copy.
• ☰A plain text file prints as text, wrapped to the page in the editor’s own monospaced face. It has no rendered form, so there is nothing else it could honestly be.
• ✎It prints what is on screen, unsaved typing included. The version on disk and the version you are looking at differ exactly when you have not saved yet, and printing the older one is the kind of wrong answer you would only find out about after it came out of the printer.
• ▤Page breaks land between blocks. A heading, a paragraph, a list item or a table that would straddle a break moves to the next page rather than being cut in half; only a block taller than a whole page is ever divided. The text on the page is text, so a document printed to PDF is still searchable and selectable.

The difference picture is of the pages it compared

• ▣A de-skewed pair’s highlight is drawn from the aligned pages now, not the originals. v5.2 taught the pixel difference to correct a skew before comparing, but the picture on screen was still of the two pages as they are — so the correction moved the outlines and wrote the caption while the glow went on showing every line doubled, and the reader could see no sign the alignment had happened. On a 0.5° skew the unchanged paragraphs now fall back to a faint ghost and the one that was rewritten stays bright. It is less work rather than more: one pass over the aligned pair instead of two, which takes a little over 40% off the comparison and ~25 MB off what it allocates.
• ⚠The glow is still not clean, and the caption still says “best effort”. Correcting a skew rotates one page and leaves the other alone, and resampling moves every anti-aliased edge — so a corrected pair still lights more than the words that changed. Measured on a page with one paragraph rewritten: the honest answer is one region, and even a perfect correction reports eight.

The ⌘/ reference grows sideways

• ▤Three columns instead of two. Seven rows arrived at once and the two-column window was already as tall as a 13″ display allows, so the reference is wider and shorter rather than taller — a reference you scroll is a reference you stop reading. Every chord above has its row.

Where your sources start

• ☁iCloud is rooted at iCloud Drive itself, what Finder shows under that name, and it lands on Documents when the container has one. Its root used to be ~/Documents — the one folder the Documents favorite also names — so the favorite claimed the provider, the Locations section had no iCloud row at all, and the breadcrumb’s first crumb had nothing above Documents to go to. A Mac with Desktop & Documents syncing switched off opens at whatever the container does have.
• 📁Desktop and Documents still read “in iCloud”, and a click still navigates there. macOS keeps the real folders in your home directory and leaves two hidden links to them in the container, so the app now carries a table of which name means which folder and composes every path through it.
• 💾The startup disk is back in Locations, above any card and above the Trash. It had been a default favorite since late August on the argument that both it and home are places you navigate to from a standing start — an argument that fits home and never fitted the disk, which is the widest scope and the least often wanted. Existing installs are moved once, so a disk you put back into Favorites afterwards stays there.
• ⚙A cloud source can open the vendor’s own settings. The row’s context menu and the account’s editor in Settings ▸ Sources carry Open iCloud Settings, which opens its System Settings pane, and Open Google Drive, which brings up the app where its settings gear lives. The label names what the door does rather than promising a settings window.
• ⚠OneDrive and Dropbox get nothing there, deliberately. Their preferences live behind their menu-bar status items, and every programmatic route was measured on a live machine and rejected: activation shows no window, their URL schemes either spawn an error window or are inert, and neither app answers scripting beyond the standard suite. A web fallback was built and turned down — the direction is native preferences or nothing, so those rows offer nothing at all rather than a disabled item.

Organize’s landing page is one set of cards

• ▤Every check on the page is now the same shape. The screen had grown five card designs — a tinted card for a lens with findings, a grey one for a scan that has not run, a third for a report, a fourth for the document survey, and, for Storage before it has ever been analyzed, no card at all. They disagreed about the surface, the corner, where a button goes and what a button looks like. One anatomy now: a glyph, a heading and a line under it, whatever the check has to show, and its small print under a rule.
• 📊Storage gets a card before its first analysis. It used to be a line of grey text at the foot of the page with an Analyze button on it — a lens with a real answer to give, dressed as a footnote about something that had already happened.
• ▶The buttons line up, and they look like buttons. Each card’s main verb is the rightmost control on it, so they run down one edge of the page; the second verb sits beside it. Nothing on the page is a bare coloured word any more — Refresh in particular was a link on one card, a button on another, and buried under a finding’s examples on a third, and the new-year reminder’s Set up… was a link sitting in the middle of its own sentence.
• ✎Renames’ card says the same thing in the same place. Its breakdown was two lines under the card in the monospaced font meant for filenames; it now reads Names worth changing — 12 names that won’t store cleanly · 58 to name or reshuffle · 1,134 to pad. — the same words the Renames lens’s own header uses, so the two summaries of one backlog cannot disagree. The generic “to sync, to convention, to order” stays where there is nothing to count, which is the only place it beats a real number.
• 📑Restructure’s card says what its backlog is made of, instead of showing you three of it. It listed three findings off the front of an unsorted list, which on a real tree meant three lines from one node_modules folder, each repeating sixty characters of the same path — telling you only that the list was not empty, which the count beside it had already said. It reads 31 Shape · 14 Loose folder · 8 Dead weight now, in the same words the lens tags each finding with, and the kinds you can actually fix come first. To File and Duplicates keep their three lines: a filename and where it would go, or a filename and how many copies, are short, different from each other, and worth reading.
• 📅The new-year reminder moved onto Restructure’s card. It was a headless row of its own, wedged between the tiles at the top and the card it was talking about — and the folder it names is one of the findings that card is counting, so it belongs on it. It sits inside that card with its own Set up… and its own ×, and the page is one rung shorter.
• 📩The inbox shortcut is a card. It used to be a row you clicked anywhere on, with a chevron for a hint — the only control on the page that gave no sign of where its hit area was. It has a button now, like everything else. It is not a check either, so it carries no small print.
• 🎨A card with findings is no longer a coloured slab. What says there is something here is the tinted glyph and the count beside it, which is what the lens rail already uses — one card in six reading as a different app was carrying a signal that was already being carried twice.
• 📏The three tiles at the top are the same height, and Restructure’s Refresh now says what it costs, under the same rule the scan cards use.
• 📝Renames summarises in the blurb too, in the same move. Its breakdown was two lines under the card in the monospaced face the slot’s usual tenants want — Invoice.pdf → Finance, clip.mp4 — 2 copies — where a fixed pitch is what lets you read a machine-generated name a character at a time. A run of prose set that way is just prose in the wrong font. The breakdown replaces the generic “to sync, to convention, to order” rather than joining it, since that phrase is the same list unfilled; the generic wording survives only where there is nothing yet to count.

The sidebar’s Recents stops repeating the rest of the column

• ✕A recent you do not want is removable. Right-click any row under Recents and choose Remove from Recents. It asks nothing and the row goes; the folder itself is untouched. Going back to that folder writes the row again, which is the bargain — Recents is a record of where you have been, and Favorites, one item up the same menu, is the list that keeps a folder for good.
• ☰A folder the column already lists is not listed twice. Visiting somewhere that is already a Favorites place or a Locations row — your Documents folder, an account’s own top level, a disk — no longer writes a Recents row underneath it. The landing folder each source opens at was already being left out for this reason; the rest of the column is now too.
• 🔗It reaches spellings a path comparison would miss. iCloud Drive’s Desktop and Documents are links into its container, so the Favorites place and the recent under the iCloud root are one folder written two ways. They are matched as one.
• 🔢The eight rows are eight rows you can see. The cap used to be applied before two of the section’s filters ran, so a recent in a source you had since removed spent one of the eight and was then dropped — leaving the section a row short for no reason on screen. It is applied last now, and counts only what is drawn.
• 🏷A source badge names a source with something on it. The badge appears once two sources contribute, and “contributes” is read off the rows now rather than off what was remembered: an account whose every recent is one of the folders above no longer puts a badge down the whole column.

Reading every document, once

• 📖Organize offers to read page one of every document in your tree, once, in the background. What To File and Restructure know has come from filenames plus whatever had been read incidentally; this is the pass that reads the tree itself, so their suggestions can use what a file says rather than only what it is called. The card states the cost before the benefit: about 3 h, pausable, and only new documents are read next time.
• 🔢It counts before it opens anything. The offer promises the number and delivers it once a walk has really happened, rather than quoting one of the cheap numbers to hand — the profile’s own file count is every file, which overstates the reading by about 7%, and overstating the work in the one sentence somebody decides on is worse than not stating it.
• ⏸Pause is never cancel, and the card says what it is waiting for. It stands aside for a scan you started, for a sleeping display — where iCloud stops handing files over, so the count freezes whatever the survey wants — for a Mac running hot, and for Low Power Mode, in that order, naming the one that is actually stopping it and adding “Resumes on its own.” Your own Pause outranks all of them: a card explaining the weather under a button you just pressed is the app talking over you.
• ⏱Progress survives a quit, and a resume states the remainder rather than the original ask. How many are still to read is a far easier second decision than three hours, and it is what makes an interrupted survey worth resuming rather than a bar stuck part-way for ever.
• 📄The completion names what it could not open — the Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents in the tree — because a summary reporting only what it managed reads as complete when it was not.
• 🧾It carries no badge and stays out of the checks-run fraction. A badge means something to act on, and reading is not that. Where a tree has already been read the card is not offered at all, because Refresh is both correct and a click, and offering three hours beside it would be offering the worse of two answers.

The People list

• ☰The roster is a list. One line per person: initials, name, relationship, and at the trailing edge the one fact worth reading across the whole list at once, how many folders and documents are theirs. Everything the row used to say — the matched forms, the areas, the documents kept out of other people’s folders, the amber caveat — and every button moves behind a disclosure, the shape the Sources tab gives its providers. Nothing is gone; it is a click further away, and every action is on the row’s context menu too. A caution glyph stays on the shut row for the one state that can change an outcome.
• ▤The page is sections, so each thing on it is one thing: People, Names found in your documents, Across your tree, and Try a filename. Seven people at three lines of evidence each, then the overview, the tester, two buttons, a source note and a six-line caption used to arrive as one unbroken column.
• 👥The order is relationship, not display name — yourself, then spouse, children, parents, siblings, then everyone else, alphabetically within each tier so two children do not swap places between launches. Sorting by name put the daughter first and the owner of the Mac fifth, which is the wrong way round for a list whose job is answering whose document this is.
• ↕And the order is yours to set. Move Up and Move Down sit in the opened row and its context menu, and once you have moved anything, Use Default Order appears under the list to give the rule back. A refused move changes nothing, so a click that did nothing cannot quietly convert the default arrangement into a custom one.
• 📂An opened row leads somewhere. Show Their Files hands the person to the same gather ⌘K’s People rows reach, with the sheet closed first so the answer lands on a pane you can see, and Show Folder lists their folders grouped by area, each one revealing that folder in Finder.
• 🔍Look for Names actually reads your documents now. The button was offered whenever a filing profile was loaded, which is every launch, but the root it handed the scanner exists only after a To File scan has run in the same session — so it bailed on nothing at all: no read, no log line, not even the “No new names” line. It worked the day it shipped and had been silent for four weeks. It reads the profile’s own tree now, which is the tree the survey walked.

Coming back to a workspace keeps what you had set

• ↺Leaving a workspace used to reset it. Each one is mounted inside its own arm of the window’s layout, so switching away tore the whole thing down and coming back rebuilt it from its defaults. What made this read as arbitrary rather than as a reset is how much already survived: you returned to the same page, the same lens, the same scope, with only the narrowing silently gone.
• ✎Edit brings the caret back to where you left it. Returning built a new text view and assigned the whole string into it, which leaves the insertion point after the last character while the scroll view is independently still at the top — so it read as “it went back to the top of the file” while the caret was in fact sitting invisibly at the bottom of it.
• 📁Browse keeps the folders you had open. The Tree’s expanded set belonged to the view, so every folder you had opened closed itself on the way to Compare and back. Opening one folder, then its child, then its child looked like it worked, because arriving re-opens the one descending path it can name; two sibling folders is the case that showed it. A folder opened on one side is now open in that side’s other workspaces, which is what a reader already expects of one tree.
• 🔍Organize keeps how you had the results narrowed — the match filter, the query you parked, the search field, the sections you unfolded, what you have freed this session, and the flags that let an empty list say “all filed” rather than “nothing was ever loose”.
• ▤Compare keeps the differences table’s filter, search, sort and folds, with the two guards its rebuild used to provide kept deliberately. A fold remembered from an earlier comparison would hide differences you have never seen, so folds carry the scan they describe and are dropped on arrival whenever the comparison has moved on. And a “failed” filter left standing after the failures are gone would filter a table with nothing failed in it down to nothing, with no visible way back to a full one, so it is resolved on arrival too.
• 🖼Duplicate thumbnails come back drawn. The tiles were rebuilt with nothing and could not ask the cache without waiting a frame, so a picture already decoded and still in memory showed one frame of the generic file-type icon on the way back. They can read it directly now. Nothing is re-requested, and the cap that withholds previews on a large group still applies.

Help now says what happens to your documents

• 📄A new article, Reading your documents. Some of what Organize knows comes from opening your files rather than reading their names — To File reads a short piece of a loose file, Refresh reads the first page of what has changed, and Duplicates reads a document’s text to tell real copies apart from files that merely share a name. Nothing said what that meant. The article says what can be opened, how much of each file is read, what is kept afterwards — ordinary words as themselves, anything with a digit in it only in scrambled form — and where all of it lives, so it can be deleted.
• 🔒And it says, plainly, that none of it is sent anywhere. No upload, no account, no sign-in, no key: the reading opens no network connection at all. SyncCloud has no server of its own, collects no usage statistics and sends no crash reports. Nothing about your files — not their contents, not their names, not how many there are — reaches anyone.
• ⚠It names the one exception itself, rather than leaving it to be found: Refine with Claude does reach Anthropic’s API, with a key you supply that stays in your Keychain, and only when you press Refine. Everything else on the page works exactly the same on a Mac with no key and no internet.
• 🧾Organize’s overview says when your documents were last read, and offers Refresh. Until now nothing on that screen said the reading had ever happened: the date lived on Restructure’s card and the refresh was an item inside a dropdown in To File. It is a receipt beside Storage’s now — what was learned, when, and one control — and Refresh reads only what has changed since, which is seconds rather than the first run’s hours.
• ✎“Update folder memory” is now just Refresh. The old name said what the app stores rather than what the button is for, in the one place most people would press it. The menu item inside To File keeps its object — Refresh what’s learned — because a bare verb in a menu names nothing.
• ⚙Settings ▸ Intelligence points at it. “Read file contents on-device” is the one switch in Settings whose whole subject is privacy, and it had the least to read beside it; it now carries a question mark that opens the article.

Fixes

• 📅The Activity Log’s day headers named the wrong day. Each section’s boundary was computed in the current time zone while the header that renders it went through a formatter still holding whichever zone the window first drew in — so entries stamped 1 June, bucketed at midnight locally, were drawn under “Sunday, May 31”. Today and Yesterday were always right, which left the wrong answer only on sections two days old and older, exactly where there is nothing else to check it against.
• 🕑Every date column in the app now reads in the zone you are actually in. A formatter whose zone is never set captures the system zone the first time it formats and keeps it for the life of the process, and these are built once each because they run per row and per render — so a window left open across a Date & Time change or a flight went on reading in the old zone for the rest of the session, an hour or five and a half out, with nothing saying so. Three columns were fixed one at a time, a hand audit found eight more, and a scan keyed on the constructor rather than on what the copies happen to be named turned up the two that audit had missed — sixteen copies across twelve files, now one shared type. The scan is what catches the next one. ~/sync-cloud.log follows the machine too: it already spans zones, because it outlives the session that wrote its earlier lines.
• 📄A folder of PDFs no longer reads as an empty one. Standing in a folder of scans, Edit’s rail said “No text files in this folder. The + button makes one.” — word for word what it says about a folder with nothing in it at all, so a folder you had just filled looked like one the app had lost. It lists text files only, which is right; what was missing was any way to tell the two cases apart. It now says how many files it passed over. A folder it could not read has no count and does not get one invented.
• ⚠A launch no longer warns about a source that is present. Restoring a pane onto Google Drive, Dropbox or OneDrive logged “Skipped a refresh: … is not among the enabled sources yet” every time, which read as a race discovery kept losing. It was not a race: the list the app seeds itself with before discovery finishes carried iCloud and your folder sources and no cloud account of any kind, so the warning was guaranteed rather than timing-dependent. The accounts discovery last saw are kept across a quit and offered to that seed. A pane pinned to an account that has since been signed out still warns, which is the case the line exists for.

Storage moves into Organize

• 📊Storage is a section of Organize now, not a workspace of its own. It is the sixth item on Organize’s rail, after Rules, and everything it does is unchanged — the treemap, the ranked lists, the magnitude bars, and the promise that it never moves, deletes, or evicts a file. ⌘3, then Storage on the rail. Quit with it open and it reopens exactly there.
• ⌘⌘4 was Storage and is now Edit. The bar is still four segments — Browse, Compare, Organize, Edit — so the count has not moved; which four has. That one chord is the thing to relearn.
• ▤All / Largest / Untouched / Reclaim moved into the page, as a capsule above the list, because the row they used to sit in belongs to Organize’s rail.
• 🎯Storage follows Organize’s scope. Set a scope and it re-analyses that folder rather than filtering the report it already had — a treemap is a picture of a whole, so a filtered one would misstate every proportion in it.
• 🧾Organize’s overview carries a Storage card: when the last analysis ran, which folder it covered, and the totals, with Re-analyze beside it. A receipt rather than a to-do — Storage never wears a count badge, because a badge means there is something to act on.

A new workspace: Edit

• ✏SyncCloud can now change what is inside a file. A collapsible file pane on the left browses to any folder, a rail beside it lists that folder’s text files, and the document sits beside them. ⌘4, or the new segment in the workspace bar.
• 👁Markdown renders in Source, Preview or Split, with a divider you can drag. Real Markdown — tables and task lists included — laid out in the app’s own type at Settings ▸ Text size, not a web view’s.
• 💾It saves itself. A couple of seconds after you stop typing, and whenever the document leaves the screen — switching workspace, closing the tab, quitting. Every write is staged and swapped in atomically, exactly like every other write in the app. ⌘S still means “now”.
• ⚠Autosave stops rather than guessing. If the file changes on disk while you have it open — or an Organize run files it somewhere else — writing would either discard what arrived or leave a second copy at the old path. So it stops, says so on the header line, and asks straight away which version wins; declining leaves it stopped rather than asking again every two seconds.
• 🔄A file comes back as the file it was. Line endings are untouched, and a file written in UTF-16 or carrying a byte-order mark is saved in the encoding it was read in rather than quietly becoming UTF-8.
• ⚠It asks before writing over a surprise. If the file changed on disk since it was opened — or was filed somewhere else by an Organize run — ⌘S says so and names which, and Cancel means nothing happened.
• 🚫It refuses rather than guess. A file that is not valid text opens read-only, because saving it would replace the parts that could not be read. One that is too large, still in the cloud, or holds no text at all is listed and dimmed with the reason, instead of opening empty.
• ☰The rail has two tabs: Text Files and Outline. Text Files is the folder’s list, with the folder it is reading named under the tabs — the same folder ⌘N creates in. Outline is the headings in the open Markdown document: click one to go to it, and the heading you are in is marked as you move about. Each tab gets the whole rail, so a long document’s outline is a list rather than a peephole — and it keeps its place per file, so coming back to a document does not send you to the top of it. The one exception is the heading you are actually in: if remembering the place would leave that off the fold, the outline opens there instead.
• ➕⌘N makes a new file in the folder you are in — a name row in the rail, nothing on disk until you press ↩, and a name with no extension becomes .md. Open in Edit on any text file’s right-click menu brings an existing one here.
• ↩Typing has its own undo. ⌘Z in the editor takes back what you typed and can never reach into a file move or a copy, which keep their own history and their own Undo button.

Writing Markdown, and moving around a document

• ✎The markup verbs are on the right-click menu — Bold, Italic, Strikethrough, Inline Code, Link…, Heading 1–3 and Body, Bulleted and Numbered List, Task Item, Block Quote, Code Block, Horizontal Rule. They are toggles rather than inserts, so Bold on bold text takes the asterisks off again, and a verb dragged across several lines asks whether every line already carries the prefix before it decides to remove one. Each verb goes in the way typing does, so ⌘Z takes back exactly one of them.
• ☑A checkbox in Preview can be ticked from Preview, and the change is written into the file. A checkbox written in the middle of a sentence stays prose, which is the same distinction the Markdown parse makes.
• 🔍⌘F searches the open document, with the Replace row already showing — find, replace, replace-all, next and previous, and a live match count. The chord routes rather than choosing: with the caret in the document it opens the document’s bar, and everywhere else it is Find in Pane, unchanged.
• 📏A status line under the document gives words, characters and lines, where the caret is by line and column, the encoding the file was read in, and how its lines are terminated — LF, CRLF, CR, or Mixed. Line endings are named, never normalised: these are cloud folders shared with other machines, and an editor that quietly rewrote a file that arrived from Windows would report the whole of it as modified to every sync client on the account.
• ☰The rail filters by name, behind a button rather than a permanent row — 232pt is too narrow to spend one on a control most sessions never touch. Case- and diacritic-insensitive, and a filter of nothing but whitespace is no filter: somebody who has typed a space and stopped is mid-thought, and answering “no files” to that is a rail that appears to have emptied itself.
• 🔴The file with unsaved changes wears a dot in the rail, at the leading edge of its row — accent while the write is pending, amber when writing has stopped, nothing when the file matches the buffer. Only the row that is actually open can wear one.
• ✎Wrapping and spell checking are yours to set, on the text view’s context menu and remembered across launches. Everything that rewrites text unasked — smart quotes, dash substitution, text replacement, autocorrect — stays off with no switch anywhere, because these are real files in real cloud folders and a curly quote in somebody’s YAML is a corrupted file. Continuous spell checking rewrites nothing; it draws a red line, which is why it is the one that is offered.
• 🔗Links open, and local images draw. A #heading link scrolls the preview instead of leaving the app, and a near-miss scrolls nowhere. An image already on this disk is drawn; one still in the cloud is refused and says so, showing the alt text its author wrote — drawing it would materialise it, pulling a file onto your disk and through your connection because you opened a note.
• 💾Autosave can be switched off for one file, on the line under its name — then nothing is written until ⌘S, and the questions you expect on the way out come back for that file. Session-only by choice: quitting restores autosave everywhere, because a remembered list of files that silently do not save would stay invisible until it cost something.
• ↩Undo survives a file switch. Each document keeps its own history, so coming back to a file you edited earlier can still take back what you did there. A history is thrown away rather than replayed when the file comes back different — reloaded from disk, filed elsewhere by an Organize run, or left with autosave off and abandoned with “Don’t Save”.
• 🧾The document header answers two questions and stops: which file, and how you are looking at it. The size moved down to the status line beside the other measurements, so the header no longer grows as the file does, and the status word appears only where it changes what you must do — unsaved — ⌘S when autosave is off for this file, a stop when it has stopped, read only when saving is not on offer. The rest of the time the dot beside the filename is the whole answer.

Comparing two files is findable now

• ◫Select a file and the action bar offers “Compare with…” — press it, then click the file to compare against, in either pane and in any folder. One selected file is what every click already gives you, and it is the only route that reaches a counterpart in the OTHER pane: selecting there would clear the selection here, so “one on each side” is not a state that exists.
• ⌘⇧⌘C does the same from the keyboard, and the verb is on the Compare menu and in the ⌘/ reference too. Every way into the file-pair viewer used to be a right-click, which meant that if you did not already know it existed you would not find it.
• ▣Two files selected together still compare in one press, where you can select two — the button reads plain “Compare” then, because that click finishes the job.
• 🔍“Compare with…” is on every file’s right-click menu, always. Pick it, then click the other file — in either pane, in any folder, after navigating as far as you like. The mode stands until you complete it, press esc, or click the armed file again; a bar across the foot of the window, a few points from the action bar you pressed, says which file is waiting, and the armed row wears a mark.
• ↔The cross-pane comparison works with a left-click now. It always worked with a right-click and only a right-click — a left-click in the other pane silently discarded the file you had lined up, because selecting in one pane clears the other. The armed file no longer lives in a selection, so the click that used to lose it is the one that completes it.

Two scans of one page, lined up

• ▣The pixel difference aligns the two pages before comparing them, best effort. Two scans of the same sheet, fed in a degree apart, used to glow all over and the view said so. It now estimates the skew and offset between them, corrects it, and captions what it corrected.
• ⚖It refuses more readily than it aligns. The estimate is judged on the sharpness of its match, not on how much error it removed: two genuinely different pages always have a best candidate, and scoring by improvement alone accepted them. Where the match is not sharp the pages are compared as they are and the original caveat stands, so the view never claims an alignment it did not achieve.

Less waiting

• ⚡Switching into Organize was costing a couple of seconds, and now does not. The structure detectors’ vocabulary pass walked every folder in the profile once per child of every family with four or more members — squared in the number of folders — on the main thread, inside a redraw. On a real 5,020-folder profile synccloud restructure --json returns byte-identical output before and after and drops from 1.78 s to 0.15 s. It was never confined to Organize: the same answer was read on every window redraw whenever a single folder was selected.
• 📊The text diff’s cost cap is measured now, not estimated. The old estimate read zero for two files holding the same lines in a different order — a re-sorted CSV, two exports sorted differently, a log interleaved by two writers — so those sailed past the cap into a comparison that could not be stopped: 5,000 lines a side took 0.96 s, 10,000 took 3.86 s, 20,000 took 16.5 s, and a 100,000-line log ran to minutes of a pinned core with no way out. Shuffled 15,000 lines a side: 13.89 s becomes 1.83 s. It loosens as well as tightens — two all-different 20,000-line files are now diffed in 1.75 s where they used to be refused outright.
• 🔄The compare surface stops redoing work you already waited for. The text diff was keyed on the display mode, so every toggle re-read both files and diffed them again; entering a pixel mode re-decoded both images before comparing. Neither the diff nor the page walk could be stopped when the surface closed, and a page walk could leave fifty PDF opens queued on the same lane a running scan uses.
• 📁Changing workspace no longer walks the filesystem several times over. The folder sidebar refreshed two to four times per switch, each doing its whole disk half synchronously on the main thread. With eleven sources that is a hundred-odd stat chains and a volume walk, repeatedly, for one click — milliseconds on a local disk, but seconds on a sleeping external drive or a stalled network mount, and this app is pointed at Google Drive and Dropbox. The walk is coalesced to one per switch, moved off the main thread, and the volume list cached between mount, unmount and rename.

Duplicates

• 🖹“Compare copies” is offered for files, not just folders. A strip across the top gives name, location, size, date and — for two PDFs — page count for both copies, emphasising what differs; two live previews sit under it. Choose which copy to keep with ←/→ or the button over either pane, and the card underneath follows.
• 🗑The verdict is one copy, not the whole group. Trashing here removes the copy you were looking at and leaves a third copy of the same file alone. It runs the same last-moment re-check every other removal does: if either copy changed since the scan, or a rescan landed while the surface was open, it refuses and names which one and why.
• ⚪Two copies the group is not keeping get no verdict at all. Open the second and third copies of a three-copy group against each other and neither of them is the keeper — so neither is marked as one, the trash button is withheld, and a line names the copy that IS being kept. The facts on screen are current, so it does not send you off to rescan.
• ⏎↩ and esc both mean Done. Trashing a copy is always a deliberate click.
• 🔑A byte-identical pair can be re-checked on the spot. “Verify now” hashes both files as they are on disk right now, and reports three outcomes rather than two: they match, they no longer match (the scan is stale — rescan before removing either), or one side could not be read, naming which and why.
• ☁A copy that has not been downloaded says so and offers to fetch it, instead of showing an empty pane — previewing it would pull the whole file down, which on a cloud folder is the normal case rather than the exception.
• ↔The surface resizes and remembers it. Drag any edge or corner; it opens at that size next time, held to what the window can actually show — so moving to a smaller display cannot leave its verdict bar off screen.

Two PDFs, or two images, move together

• 🔗Synchronised panes for PDFs and images. Scroll or zoom one side and the other follows, and ⌥ held breaks the sync while you move one alone. Quick Look has no scroll or zoom to synchronise at all, which is why this arrives with per-type viewers rather than earlier.
• 📑Paging is the PDF half — two images have no pages to turn. ⇞/⇟ move both sides at once, and scrolling onto another page walks the page strip along with you, so 1–4 open on the page you were actually reading rather than on the one you started at; ⌥ breaks that too. A strip under the panes marks each page once it has been compared — green where nothing changed, amber where something did, blue where only one document has that page, red where a side could not be rendered. A page carries no mark until its comparison has run, so nothing on the strip stands for a page that has not been looked at. Where one document is longer, the strip runs to the longer one and the shorter side stops at its last page rather than hiding the pages only one file has.
• 👀Three ways to overlay the two sides, picked with 2–4 or the segments, 1 being the plain side-by-side you start on: swipe a divider across them, blend one into the other, or see the pixel difference on black — identical is black, and anything changed glows. The difference view says outright that it compares pixels with no alignment, so two scans of one sheet of paper glowing all over reads as scanner noise rather than as content.

Two text files, line by line

• 📝A read-only side-by-side diff for text, source, CSV, JSON and the like. An edited line shows as one row with both versions on it and the changed WORDS picked out, rather than as a deleted line above an added one. ↑/↓ step between changes, not between lines.
• 🧹Files that are not quite text still open. A log truncated mid-character decodes with the unreadable bytes marked and says so, and a file that announces its encoding with a byte-order mark is read in that encoding rather than sniffed as binary. Files over 4 MB, files that are not downloaded, and files that turn out to be binary each say which of those they are. And CRLF against LF is reported as a line-ending difference, not as a thousand changed lines — while two files holding the same words in different encodings show no changed rows at all, the comparison being over decoded text rather than raw bytes, with a note above the diff to tell you the bytes differ.
• ⏳A diff it cannot afford is declined, not started. Two large files with almost nothing in common would take minutes to line up, and a single line long enough to be a whole minified file would take as long again to compare word by word. Both are refused up front and said out loud — the other modes still work — rather than leaving a spinner over a pane that was never going to answer.

The same surface in Compare

• ⚖“Compare…” on a changed row in the Differences list opens the identical viewer — facts, previews, modes, the text diff — with a Done-only bar. Differences already owns copying, moving and ignoring a row, so the viewer adds no second way to do them.

Deleting

• 🔄A move between volumes spends a retry before it destroys anything. Such a move copies to the destination and then clears the source to the Trash — and if that step failed, the cleanup fell straight through to a permanent delete. The refusal macOS raises on files you own, in folders you own, is exactly such a failure, so under it a move could quietly become a deletion of the original. That refusal is now retried first, which is what rescues it. The unrecoverable fallback is still there for a volume with no Trash at all, and the log names it when it is taken.
• ⚠A Trash refusal is retried before it is reported. The app asks the system’s own Trash service, and failing that re-registers the item with a move in place and tries again. Whether that clears any particular refusal is not promised — the failure comes and goes on its own — but one that survives both attempts now says what was tried and what was observed, rather than naming a cause it cannot know.

Elsewhere

• 📜The Activity Log survives a log file it cannot fully decode. One byte of invalid UTF-8 — an append cut short by a crash, or a path written by another process — took the entire previous-session history with it and put an error note where the history should have been. The unreadable bytes are now marked and everything around them loads.

What Restructure finds

• 🔍Eight kinds of finding where there was one: siblings shaped differently; a year with files and no folders yet; a year hiding inside a name like IRS Docs - 2023; two names for one thing (Form W-2 beside Form W2); a folder in an inbox mirroring a real destination; files parked above a run of year folders; a leaf sitting beside the folder that owns its concept; and two branches holding the same documents under parallel names. Each card names what it saw and the class of change that would fix it, so a rename reads differently from a merge before any sheet opens.
• 📊Crowding is counted, not accused. Pass-through folders, single-file folders and empty ones get three counts above the findings — no badges, no cards, because every real tree has them. Only the empty count offers to act.
• 🔴The badge counts what you can drive to zero. Findings that hand off to another surface, and the crowding counts, stay out of it.
• ⚖“Nothing is wrong” and “I could not check” never share words. A clean result says how many folders it checked; a missing survey says it has nothing to read.
• 📅The lens says when the tree was last looked at, and offers a Rescan once that stamp is old enough to matter. It used to report only how many folders it covered.

Planning a new shape

• 🛠One mapping, applied to every member. The sheet lists every distinct folder name the family uses, once, each defaulting to keep — so you answer “what should this be called” a couple of dozen times instead of dragging hundreds of files.
• ☐Nothing is pre-selected. The shapes on offer are the ones actually in use, each naming the siblings that vouch for it. Where the newest members all disagree, the sheet says outright that there is no current shape to continue.
• 💰The cost of a choice is shown where the choice is made. Point two names at one target and the row says it is a merge, and in how many members.
• 📝Every operation is derived, never typed. The review lists them in run order, each naming its member and the files it carries, beside a before-and-after of one member’s folders.
• 🔒Nothing is dropped to make the shape fit, and collisions keep both. A folder the target has no slot for stays where it is and is listed as kept; a file whose name is already taken arrives under a new one. Never an overwrite.
• ✨Optional refinement with Claude, on the names only. It answers row by row against your mapping and declines where a folder says nothing about itself. Accepting a row edits your mapping and the plan is re-derived — there is no path from a suggestion to the disk that skips the review.
• 💾“Export plan…” is the safe way to stop. It writes the plan as a dated JSON file beside your survey and keeps it, so the card offers “Review N operations” afterwards, even after you quit.

Applying, and taking it back

• ▶Apply is the only thing here that writes, and you can watch it run. It refuses to start while a scan or another file operation is running — with a sentence, not a queue. The reversal is written to disk before the first folder moves.
• 🔍Every claim is re-probed at the moment of the action. A folder holding a file the plan never listed is skipped and named while the rest of the plan runs; a destination taken since gets a new name rather than an overwrite.
• ✓The result is checked by a second code path, independent of the code that did the work, with the verdict on the card. A mismatch is reported and never rolled back automatically.
• 🔄A finding disappears because the tree was re-read, not because it was marked done. The landing ends by re-deriving the survey from a fresh walk. If that step fails, the card says so in its own words rather than borrowing the success sentence.
• 🗑Removing folders is separate, opt-in, and folders only. No file is deleted by Restructure at any stage. The sheet prints every path in full and moves what you tick to the Trash.
• ↩Two undos, and the card says which is which. ⌘Z takes the whole landing back as one step and is gone once you quit. “Undo this reorganisation” replays a reversal kept on disk through the same guards and re-probing, and survives quitting — it can partly fail, and it names what it could not put back.

Setting up a new year

• 📅“Set up like its siblings” creates the folders and moves nothing — the folders the rest of the series has, each justified by how many siblings already have it. ⌘Z removes them again. The loose files go to To File, scoped to that folder alone.
• 🔔The Organize overview raises it the month it happens rather than waiting for you to go looking, and remembers being dismissed.

Getting to Organize

• ☰The Organize menu learns the new verbs. “Plan This Folder’s Shape…” and “Set Up Like Its Siblings” join it, aimed at whatever the focused pane has selected.
• ⚠“Undo This Reorganisation” is deliberately not in Edit. It is not ⌘Z — it replays an inverse from disk and can partly fail — so putting it beside Undo would have been the most misleading place available. It is the one item there that needs no selection.
• 🔑“Check This Folder’s Shape” is in a folder’s row menu and in ⌘K, aimed at the folder you are already standing on.

Duplicates

• 🗑Name-only matches are gone. A group of same-named, different-content folders was a warning with no resolution attached, and it crowded out the findings that had one. Folders now join an overlapping group on their own merits rather than on an average across everything sharing their name — so a genuine twin is no longer lost to three unrelated folders that happen to share its name.
• 📏The pills that name a subset are the filter now. They looked interactive and were inert. The figures that are not subsets stopped dressing like filters: the reclaimable total is plain text.
• 🏷The badge says what you need to do, not what the match was. Byte-identical groups carry no badge at all — their certainty reads in the green reclaim figure, and the space goes to the file’s icon and name. The rest say “needs review”.
• 📌Picking a different copy to keep no longer reorders the list, so there is still a before and after to compare, and the row under the pointer is the row you clicked.

On the command line

• 💻synccloud restructure reports the whole detector set over a surveyed tree, with --json for the full report and --profiles-dir to read a survey from elsewhere. It never touches the disk it describes.

Sources

• 🌎A source now starts at the account folder. Folders beside Documents are reachable, and the breadcrumb names the source rather than opening on “Documents” for every account.
• 📍Where a pane opens is yours to choose. Each account source has an Open at row in Settings, with Choose… and Reset; it is measured from the root, so it survives the account folder moving. If the folder you picked is renamed away, panes open at the root and the row says so.
• 🔒The root itself is no longer a field, because it is not a preference. An account has one true root and the app discovers it; the row shows it with Show in Finder. If you had set a custom Location in an earlier version, that is carried forward and the row offers Reset to go back to the folder the account is signed in at. A folder source is its own root and keeps the single editable Location field it has always had.
• ☁iCloud deliberately stays rooted at your Documents folder. Its real container is a dead end on a Mac with Desktop & Documents syncing on — Desktop and Documents appear there as hidden symlinks that report themselves as non-directories, so every listing that skips hidden files drops them. Rooting iCloud there would have shown two folders out of four while claiming to cover the cloud.
• 🔄Everything you had stored moves with the root. Both tab strips, each pane’s last folder, pinned and recent folders, the Favorites order, filing destinations and the per-pair ignore sets are all measured from a source root, and are rebased on first launch so they name the same folders as before.
• ✏What you authored is left exactly where you put it. An automation’s destination, the loose-files inbox and the taxonomy a filing scan files against stay anchored to the folder a pane lands in rather than being re-pointed at the account root — TODO names a real folder at the top of a OneDrive account as well as one inside its Documents, and moving them silently would have changed which one they meant.

The pane header

• 🏷The provider capsule is gone; the first breadcrumb crumb is the source picker. The two were the same fact in the same corner, tinted the same hue, and the capsule was the larger of them — it restated its own second row, and it was what pushed the toolbar off the left edge of the header. Clicking the crumb opens the source list, with Go to <source> as its first item.
• 📏The toolbar starts in the same place on every pane. Measured across the header’s sixteen layout cases: the bar’s leading edge is now at 17pt in all sixteen, where it used to land anywhere between 77pt and 372pt depending on how long the source’s name was. At 570pt wide, the same pane started its toolbar at 223pt for a source called “iCloud Drive” and 372pt for a long custom name — a 149pt swing from the name alone.
• 🕶Narrow panes keep more of the toolbar. A 250pt pane draws seven controls where it drew five. All nine are now drawn from 330pt, where it used to take 490pt; and a pane with a long custom source name at 490pt had room for five and now has room for all nine.
• 🎯The source crumb is drawn as the control it is — a capsule sized to match the toolbar’s own controls, carrying the source’s mark, its name, and its own disclosure arrow.
• 📄The trail is bigger. Crumbs were the smallest text in the header; they are a size up now, with more room between them and more space between the toolbar and the trail beneath it.

The sidebar

• ⭐Your home folder and the startup disk are in Favorites on a first run. Five standard places now, not three. They used to sit in Locations, on the reasoning that home contains the other three and a disk is hardware — but they are the two places you navigate to from a standing start, and Locations on a machine with several cloud accounts is where you go to find an account. Removing either from Favorites returns it to Locations.
• 🛠“Restore Standard Folders” is now “Restore Standard Places”, because it restores a disk.
• 🕑A recent no longer carries a second line. A recent’s qualifier is its parent folder, and that parent is a top-level folder often enough that the line came out repeating the source badge on the row’s other end. A recent is somewhere you were minutes ago and recognise; a favorite is one you chose once and may not, so only favorites carry the second line. Recents still count toward the collision that makes a favorite need one, and the source and folder are still in the tooltip on both.

Tabs

• 🏷Two tabs that would otherwise read the same are told apart. A tab is titled after its folder’s leaf name, and its brand mark separates a Dropbox tab from a OneDrive one — but not two accounts of the same brand, which is the collision you are most likely to have. A colliding title now takes the source’s own name, or, for two folders under one source, the parent folder — and only where that actually separates them. Tabs that already read differently are untouched, and a duplicated tab is left alone rather than growing two identical suffixes.
• 🎨The strip reads like the list under it. Every tab sits on a surface of its own now, and the one you are on takes the same accent tint a selected folder takes in the pane below it — so the strip and the list answer “which one am I on” in the same colour. Only the active tab had a surface before, which left the others as bare labels and made a strip of five read as one tab with some words after it. The live tab quietens in the pane you are not working in, exactly as that pane’s selected rows do; the rule under it does not, so the strip still names the live tab in the pane you are not in.
• 🌈The strip follows the app’s accent. The rule under the live tab was drawn in the macOS system accent rather than the one you picked, so it stayed system blue in a Green or Amber window. The “None” accent is unaffected, because there it is the system accent.
• 🔃A tab switch could leave the other pane on your previous sort order. Changing the sort re-orders both panes’ trees off the main thread — brief, but not instant on a large one — and a tab switch landing inside that window threw the result away, on the reasoning that whatever interrupted it would hand both panes freshly-ordered trees. A tab switch does not: it reloads only the pane that moved, so the pane you did not move kept the order you had just changed away from, with nothing on screen saying so, until something else reloaded it. You had to be quick to catch it, which is most of why it went unnoticed. The re-order now tries again instead of giving up, and changing a pane’s source reaches the same window in this release, so the fix covers that door too.

Moving and copying

• 📂A chosen folder in the Move to… sheet was drawn as two shapes at once. The sheet’s shortcut rail, its folder columns and its search results all draw a rounded-rect row, but handed their selection and hover styling no shape to match it — and both of those default to a capsule. A chosen row therefore wore a rounded-rect accent fill under a pill, and at rest the hairline ring traced that pill around the rectangle. Each row now names its outline once and fills, hit-tests and rings the same shape.

Speed

• ⏳Navigating one pane no longer reloads the other. Switching tabs already reloaded just the pane that moved, but navigating — the commonest gesture in the app — went through a channel that carried no pane with it, so it was honoured as “reload both” and the other pane’s tree was re-walked on a source and a folder that had not changed. With the prefetch cache warm that is wasted work you still see as a flicker; cold, after any file operation, sort change or force refresh, it is a full second walk of tens of thousands of files for a tree that was already correct. A refresh now names the pane that moved. Anything that genuinely changes both — a finished file operation, a date-tolerance change, a sort that needs fresh tags — still reloads both.
• 🖹Changing one pane’s source leaves the other pane alone. Picking a different account on the right used to reset the left pane as well — the pane you had not been near dropped its tree and re-walked behind a spinner, flattened an open Columns stack, cleared its selection, emptied its Back history, and went back to its own root. Editing a source’s Location in Settings dropped and re-walked both trees for the same reason, though it left the selection and history alone. Only the pane you retargeted is touched now, on both paths. The comparison itself still refreshes whole, because a comparison belongs to the pair — but a tree, a column stack, a selection and a history belong to one pane, and the other pane’s are all still correct.

Organize

• 🔍“Text contains” now means the exact phrase, everywhere. It had two readings: the loose word-by-word one on the Organize scan, which is the path that moves files, and the strict one in the Automations preview. So “tax return” could move a document that said “tax” and “return” pages apart, after a preview that said it would not. Separate words are still matchable, as “Mentions the words”.

Duplicates and comparison

• ⚠A file rewritten while it was being hashed could be remembered under the wrong digest. Everything the scan knew about a file came from its path, read before the file was opened, so none of it was provably about the bytes that followed — and a rewrite of the same byte count produced a digest of two files spliced together. The file is now stat'd through its own descriptor before the read and after, where the timestamp catches what a byte count cannot.
• 📋Files a duplicate scan could not read are counted now, instead of vanishing from it. A candidate that was gone, unreadable, or changed while it was being hashed was dropped with nothing recording it — no pill, no note, no log — while every other skip reason was tallied and named. They join the “skipped” note now, as “unreadable or changed while being read”.
• ⏳A duplicate scan does less work to reach the same answer. It read a file's path three times before opening it; now once, plus one more for a symlink and one for a file it is about to open. On a repeat scan every digest is cached, so that first read is all the hashing does. Digest text is now a table lookup, and a long scan publishes progress about a hundred times instead of several hundred.
• 🖼Duplicate thumbnails no longer decompress while you scroll. Each was compressed to PNG purely to satisfy a rule about what may cross between threads, then decompressed again — lazily, which means at draw time, on the main thread, during the scroll that asked for it.
• ☵A comparison with ignore patterns set folds them once per scan rather than once per item compared, and folds each name once rather than once per pattern it is tested against.
• ⏱Starting or finishing a bulk sync no longer locks the window while it marks the rows. Flagging each row as in-flight rewrote the whole difference list and asked for a redraw, once per row. On a comparison with tens of thousands of differences that cost about eleven seconds at each end, doing nothing but setting a flag. The rows are marked in one pass now, and drawn once.
• 🔍Rebuilding the difference list stops taking every path apart to ask one question of it. Deciding whether a path is hidden split it into components and built a string for each, once per difference, on every rebuild — and hiding hidden files is the one filter of five that runs unless you turn it off. On 29,000 differences that was about 37 ms a pass, now about 2 ms, with exactly the same files hidden.
• 📁Scanning a large tree resolves far fewer paths. Every directory the walk entered had its whole path resolved so the scan could tell whether it had been there before — a symlink-loop guard that fires essentially never, and about half the cost of entering a directory. Only a directory whose last component is a symlink needs it now, and every cycle is still caught.

Appearance

• ○The “None” accent now reads white in light, not the faintest gray. At low Tint, bare material and Graphite's neutral wash landed within a couple of points of the same gray, so the two were told apart by their swatches and nothing else. “None” now lays a white film over the background in light, titlebar included. Dark is untouched.
• ℹThe Info inspector's toolbar button moved to the far right. The trailing pill read Go to, Info, Logs, Settings, which put the control that opens the right-hand rail three glyphs from the edge it opens against. It now reads Go to, Settings, Logs, Info, mirroring the folder-sidebar toggle at the far left. Same buttons, same ⌘I.
• ▶The selected workspace and the active pane tab now slide between positions. Both markers were drawn per item, so switching cut one out where it was and cut a new one in where it was going — two bars, one above the other, both blinking. Reduce Motion takes the destination and skips the journey.
• 🔢A count that changes rolls its digits instead of cutting to a new number. Diff totals, duplicate-group counts and the filing backlog hard-swapped: the old number vanished, a new one appeared, and nothing said they were the same quantity. Words are left alone — rolling a word's glyphs reads as a glitch.
• 👆The first-run sheet answers the pointer. Seven of its controls drew their own chrome, which means macOS contributes no hover state at all — so the app's first impression was its least responsive surface. Each has an affordance now, chosen for what the control does.
• ◯One vocabulary for corner radii. Eleven distinct radii were hand-written across the app, so three chips inside one card could round by different amounts. Four named stops now, each a value the app already used most, with the strays moved to their nearest by a point.
• ⏸Twenty-two of the app's animations honour Reduce Motion that did not before. Opting in used to mean wiring an environment read into whatever view owned the animation, so most motion was unconditional — friction rather than a decision. What is gated now is anything that travels: panes collapsing, a workspace switch, the inspector, tabs sliding under a drag, the focus ring moving between panes, the search field growing out of its magnifier, Browse's folder sidebar. Motion that reports rather than travels — a hover wash, a rolling count — is left alone.
• ⟳The small inline spinners are drawn at their size instead of shrunk to it. Three status rows scaled an already-drawn spinner down to seven-tenths, and scaling resamples, so those three read softer than identical spinners a few files away. They are framed to occupy exactly what the old recipe reserved, so no row moves.
• ♿Twenty-seven controls that are nothing but an icon now have names. A tooltip is not a name on macOS, so VoiceOver read them as “button” and Voice Control could not be told to click them at all. Toolbars, row actions, dismiss glyphs and the new-tab plus now say what they do. Nothing about this is visible on screen.

The sidebar

• ◫Three sections, and View ▸ Sidebar (⌃⌘S) shows or hides the column. Each heading folds, and a folded one says how many rows are behind it so it does not read as empty. Drag the column's edge to set its width, between 150 and 280 points.
• ★Favorites is yours. It starts as Desktop, Documents and Downloads — Finder's own three — and every row can be taken out. A place moves between Favorites and Locations rather than appearing in both, and Restore Standard Folders is offered only when one is actually missing.
• 📁Add a folder to Favorites from the pane you are looking at. Right-click any folder in a pane. The sidebar's rows can only manage folders already listed, and the pane header's jump menu acts on the folder the pane is showing rather than the one under the pointer.
• ☁Each account draws its own mark. Dropbox's folds, Drive's triangle, OneDrive's lobe — in one ink rather than five brand colours down a quiet column. Where two rows would read the same word, the account name is added beside it.
• ↕Drag a row to reorder it — and drag a recent up into Favorites to keep it. Favorites and Locations both hold your own order, and the Locations order is the one Settings stores — so the sidebar and the pane header's dropdown cannot disagree.
• ↷Right-click a row for Open in New Tab, Add to or Remove from Favorites, and — in Compare — Open in Left Pane / Open in Right Pane, which sends one folder to one side without changing where the next click will land.
• ↗Show in Enclosing Folder opens the folder a favorite or a recent lives in, rather than the folder itself — the question you ask when a name has stopped being enough: two Legal folders in one account, or a recent you no longer recognise.
• 🗑A local folder that is not a source yet says so before it becomes one, and can be taken back from the row itself. The Trash opens in Finder and is never scanned, hashed, or filed into.

In Compare, the sidebar says which pane it opens into

• ◨One rule decides which pane, and it is the pane you last clicked in. Anywhere in it — a row, the tab strip, the source chip, empty chrome. The header above the column reads "Opens on Left" or "Opens on Right", and describes every row below it.
• ▣The focused pane is drawn with a faint accent border along its own card edges, so the answer is on screen rather than something to remember. It is the same pane the file action bar, ⌘F and the folder-scoped verbs act on.

Very large folders

• ⏳A pane pointed at a folder with hundreds of thousands of directories in it no longer hangs. The deep walk was bounded for depth and not for width, so a home folder or a whole startup disk was walked to the end however long it took. It stops at a budget now, and a folder it skipped is read when you open a column into it.
• 📂A folder the pane has not read yet no longer claims to be empty. The first paint is deliberately shallow so a pane appears at once, which means every child folder arrives unread — and the display drew “empty” over the difference. A folder that genuinely cannot be listed says “Can't be read”.
• ⚠Every whole-tree pass a workspace can start asks before walking a folder that large — Storage, Find Duplicates, Renames, Filing, and updating folder memory. The prompt says “more than”, never a total: the probe that found the folder too big stopped early, so it does not know how much it did not see.
• ⓘA comparison that could not read one side in full now says so , above the differences. A folder that cannot be listed has always made SyncCloud report nothing on that side as missing, because it cannot tell an absence from something it never read; what is new is that the table admits it. The comparison's own scan now stops at the same budget the pane does, so either way the count is a floor rather than a total.
• 💾A source covering the whole startup disk is named after the disk, not /.

Appearance

• 🎨The Tint slider now sets how coloured the whole window is, and Subtle finally means subtle. It moved only the panes and the Differences area before, and its own bottom end painted nothing at all — while the window behind those panes carried the accent at full strength whatever the slider said, which is why the two ends looked so alike. At Subtle the panes' wash now fades out entirely while the window keeps a quarter of its strength. Vivid is unchanged.
• ◫The pane's tab strip takes the tint with the rest of the pane. It was the one part of a pane that never did, so at a strong tint it read as a pale stripe across the top of the pane it belongs to.

Go to

• ⌘Every Settings tab is a ⌘K destination, matched on the words of the controls inside it. Typing “appearance” used to match nothing — the word lived only in Settings' own search field, which you cannot reach without Settings already open. Ten rows now, one per tab, in the rail's order.

Files the app could have destroyed

• 🗄A file that exists but cannot be read is no longer mistaken for one that isn't there. Six stores consulted the decode result and never the failure to open, and every consequence was silent: the first edit to a person replaced the whole household, one refusal wiped the record of everyone you had ever declined. Each store now tells the two apart, moves the unreadable bytes aside, and refuses the write until that has landed.
• ⚙️A setting only a newer build understands survives your next edit of it. Five settings read tolerantly and then wrote the live value back, so a value this build could not interpret read as the default and was overwritten the first time you touched it. The original is kept beside the setting now.
• 👤A key written on a person survives an edit. The model reads five fields, drops the rest, and rewrites the whole file — so a nickname, or a `_why` typed next to the person it explains, was gone the first time anybody edited anybody.
• 🔑An unreadable filing artifact suspends the classification cache instead of quietly changing its key. Leaving it out of the fingerprint minted a key that can never occur again once the file is fixed, so every classification already paid for became unreachable and the same documents would be paid for twice.

Cloud files that are not on disk

• ☁️Offloaded Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive and Box files are recognised as placeholders. The check asked iCloud's question, which is false for every other provider. Online, a filing survey opened them and made the provider download your entire offloaded library; offline, they were written off as blank and never revisited.

Undo and redo

• ↩⌘Z after copying a folder no longer destroys the work you did inside the copy. It compared the folder's own date and child count, which an edit two levels down leaves untouched — so ⌘Z read the copy as pristine and trashed it, permanently on a volume with no Trash. It records a digest of the whole tree now.
• ⤺Redoing a delete no longer trashes whatever has taken the path since. The redo re-trashed by bare path. Delete a file, ⌘Z, let a different file land on that path, ⌘⇧Z — and the replacement went to the Trash with no banner and no log line.
• ↩️A “press ⌘Z to undo” stops standing after the step it points at. The rename pass and the name normalizer wrote the sentence without setting the flag that retires it, so it survived onto the next operation and pointed at that one instead. The merge banner had the opposite half missing.
• ⇄File operations run strictly in the order you asked for them. The serial queue's prologue hopped off the main actor and back before claiming its slot, so two operations starting together could run concurrently. The worst reachable form was a merge's own undo pair inverting.

Duplicates, merging and deleting

• 📂Folder duplicate groups are judged file by file. The freshness check counted a folder's contents by different rules than the scan used, so any group holding a `.DS_Store` or a symlink was refused permanently — and the same offset could equally mask a real loss.
• ⚖️The Compare review checks what it is about to trash, and stops promising an undo it cannot honour. The gate passed on existence alone, so a file that landed in the right-hand folder while the review sat open was trashed along with it — and the confirmation read “Reversible with ⌘Z” even on volumes where nothing reaches the undo manager.
• 🔗Merging duplicates is safer to undo and safer to trash after. Undo grouping is global to the window and the merge held its group open across every suspension, so an unrelated operation finishing in that window came back with one ⌘Z. A keeper emptied mid-merge still had its copy trashed. Edit ▸ Undo also offered to reverse merges whose copies had been destroyed permanently.
• ⚠️The permanent-delete confirmation names what it is about to destroy. The app's one unrecoverable dialog discarded the list, and for a single item showed only the basename — no help at all when the two candidates are duplicate copies with the same name.
• 🔗A dangling symlink is deleted instead of reported as already gone. The trash was gated on an existence check that follows the link, and that branch had no else: no error, no banner, no place in the removed count. You were told it succeeded and the link stayed where it was.

Verdicts that had gone stale

• ✅The verified-copy offer re-checks both ends before it writes. Its guards count this app's own writes and nothing else, and the dialog never expires — so a cloud daemon syncing down a new version while the offer sat open was invisible.
• ⌨︎`sync` re-checks its plan against disk before each write. The plan was drawn once at scan time and then executed however long the `[y/N]` prompt sat there, `--verify` included.
• 🤖An automation checks a row is still its file before moving it. The apply gated on nothing more than a non-empty destination, and a dry-run report can sit on screen for minutes.

Filing

• 💵A cloud filing pass stands down when it cannot price the model. The spend check read a missing price as zero — the one substitute that fails every consumer in the same direction: the estimate reads as free and the cap cannot bind.
• 💸“Try another folder” says no before it spends, not after. It routes to the paid tier and ran no pre-flight at all — no estimate, no cap warning, no refusal for a model this build has no rate for. The check happens on the click now, keeps the free on-device suggestion, and says which limit stopped it.
• 📄“Try another folder” sends the page it already read. The re-ask went out with the file's name and nothing else, though the scan had already extracted its first page and was holding it — a paid round trip that could not change anything.
• 🕰A file whose date cannot be read is asked again rather than answered from a stale verdict. The cache keyed an unreadable date as 1970-01-01 and an unreadable size as 0 bytes — two values a real file can genuinely have. Such a file is simply left out of the cache now, in both directions.
• 🔍A file whose scan never came back is no longer stuck. The extractor has no timeout, so a render that never returned left the file latched, every later attempt a silent no-op, surviving any number of rescans. Switching provider clears it. “File recommended” can no longer be started twice.

The keyboard

• ⌨️The Organize review card's ⏎ and ⌫ decide once, unmodified, and only when the card has focus. This is the surface where ⏎ moves real bytes. Every modifier combination ran the primary action, a held ⏎ launched four copies of one row, and with Full Keyboard Access on, ⏎ aimed at the focused Skip button ran the copy.
• 🚶The filing walkthrough's ⏎, → and esc stay inside the card. They were window-level key equivalents, which macOS consults before the first responder — so ⏎ typed into the lens header's search field filed the document on screen, and an esc meant for that field discarded every approval.

Renaming

• 🔤A case-only tidy lands on the cased name, and case-only renames work at all. Renaming `07. jul 2016.pdf` to `07. Jul 2016.pdf` produced `07. Jul 2016 2.pdf` — the file collided with itself. One layer down every case-only rename failed outright: you could not rename foo to Foo.

Also

• 🔎The ⌘K results panel no longer paints dark notches at its corners, and the bulk difference menu acts on rows as they are when you pick an item rather than when you right-clicked.
• 🔗A symbolic link can be moved into the folder it points at. The check that stops a folder being moved inside itself followed the link first, so an alias and its target read as one container and an ordinary move was refused.
• ✏️A folder name typed into "Create as" no longer follows you to a different destination. Pressing “Try another folder” replaced the suggestion under the same card while the field kept what you had typed.
• ⌨️synccloud refuses an argument that names both a configured provider and a different folder on disk, instead of silently picking one.
• 📖The Help book now covers what v4.2 added — the file clipboard, the Storage bars and the ⌘K redesign shipped without ever being described in the book that describes the app.

Setting up

• ✓A fresh install is asked four questions rather than shown six pages of prose. Your name, which discovered sources you use and which is primary, who else is in the household, and which folder to learn from.
• 📁The Folders step walks your tree and writes the profile. Names and counts only — seconds rather than the hours a document survey needs, and it takes effect without a relaunch.
• 🏷It proposes the place names it found, and nothing starts ticked. Mined from folder names, so every mistake it makes is an invention: EMP is an employer, PRD a product stage. Each chip says how many folders it would affect.
• 👥It proposes the household too, from the one folder that says what its children are. Family/Daughter is a person because Family said so. It over-proposes deliberately — a name you must think of unprompted costs more than one you refuse with a click.
• 💾Answers are kept when there is nowhere yet to put them. You and People have nowhere to write until the walk mints a profile. Both rows say so, and are applied to the roster when it arrives — adding, never removing. Where the roster is one the store refuses to write over, the step names that refusal and disables Add and Remove rather than offering edits that do nothing.

Safety

• 📌An unreadable pin list was destroyed by the next pin you made. The folder-jump store decoded with `try?`, so a blob it could not read left the store looking like a fresh install — and nothing was lost on that read. The loss came on the next write, which encoded that emptiness over your curated pins. The bytes are kept aside now and pinning carries on.

The menu bar

• ⌘Cut, Copy, Paste and Select All reach your files. All four are text-editing keys, so the keystroke is handed back whenever the caret owns it: ⌘C still copies text in a search or a rename field. ⌘X then ⌘V is a move.
• 📋And the clipboard reaches Finder. A copy writes file URLs to the system pasteboard and a paste reads them, both directions. It stays one clipboard — SyncCloud's own list answers until anything else writes.
• ▤Organize has a menu. Its five sections, ticked, then its four row verbs. Every verb refuses a multiple selection, because organizing two folders is two questions.
• 📄The row menu's verbs are in File — Open in New Tab, Quick Look, Reveal in Finder, Rename, Copy to…, Move to… and Ignore in Comparison, each of which previously needed a right-click on exactly the right row.
• ↩↩ renames the selected row. A pane key handler rather than a menu equivalent: a registered bare ↩ would outrank every default button in the app, and Finder does not register it either.
• ␣Space no longer opens Quick Look on top of the destination picker. A pick owns the keyboard until you answer it, and Space was a list key handler rather than a menu item — so it never went through the publication that silences the rest.
• ⇹⌘← and ⌘→ are in the Compare menu. The four directional transfers worked but had no menu route, and a menu item is what lets a chord be read as well as pressed. Their titles name the providers.
• ▭Each auxiliary window is listed once. Keyboard Shortcuts, Activity Log, Sync History and About each appeared twice. One of each pair is generated by SwiftUI and written down nowhere, so no source scan could see it.
• 🪟The Window menu says which folders the window is on — it had read “SyncCloud” for a window that could be on any pair of folders in any cloud. Mission Control reads that name whether or not a title bar is drawn.

Go to (⌘K)

• 🔎⌘K grows the toolbar's Go to pill into a field, and the results hang under it. It was a 620pt card floating over a dimmed window; the tree you are navigating now stays visible while you type.
• /Type a path and it goes there. Finder's ⇧⌘G as a behaviour rather than a surface. A bare name is still a search, or typing Documents would shadow every folder you have.
• ⚠A path it cannot deliver says why instead of doing nothing. “Not in any source”, “In Dropbox — switch source first”, “Backup SSD is not mounted”, “No folder at that path”.
• ↺Recents survive quitting. Session-scoped is right for a pane's jump menu and wrong for a field whose entire empty state is that list.
• ☾A sleeping drive says so rather than opening blank. An external disk that was not awake opened ⌘K completely empty, with “no recents” indistinguishable from “not mounted”. Those folders are listed and marked Not available now.

Storage

• 📊Storage's ranked lists draw a magnitude bar and a share. Every size was set in the same weight at the same position, so a four-fold difference read as nothing until you compared the digits. Each bar is scaled to its section's own largest file.
• 🎨The treemap is one ramp instead of ten hues. Colour was assigned by index, so the eye kept looking for a legend that could not exist. It runs deep to pale in your own accent, ordered by size, so the colour is the ranking.

Text size and spacing

• AaText size is a percentage, 90% to 135%, in 5% steps. It had four stops with a 25-point hole between Default and Large. The four keep their names as detents under the slider's ticks.
• ⚙They live in a Readability tab of their own. Text size and row spacing answer the same question and sat as two unrelated pickers in Appearance. “List density” is now “Row spacing”.
• ▦Five presets over the two controls — each step showing less and reading bigger — with a live preview of three real file rows. The preview is the only thing that shows what Compact costs: it drops each file's size and date.
• 🔒Your stored size migrates at launch. Every release before this stored a word rather than a number, and a build reading an integer cannot see it — so without the migration every chosen size would have opened at 100%.

Help

• ⤢The Help card can be resized, and remembers the size. Fixed at 760×520 on the argument that its content is bounded — true of the sidebar, false of the articles. Eight grips and a 560×400 floor.
• ▤The rail stops truncating its titles. Every row set a one-line limit on a rail fixed at 220pt, so no window size got the word back: the surface you enlarge the type to read answered by removing letters.
• 📖The book describes the app again. Nineteen articles became twenty-eight, fixing four drifts at once — a Help item that no longer exists, a tab renamed out from under two articles, three Organize sections with no article at all, and “Requires macOS 15”, two majors out of date.
• 🔤The source switch stops naming a column the app does not have. It described the enable/disable switch as “Show <name> in the pane sidebar”, and there has been no pane sidebar since 2026-07-14. It names the source-picker list now, which is what it actually controls.

People

• 👤The person panel stops calling everyone “her”. Four strings were written to a fixture — the header capsule, both group titles and the misfiling subtitle. The panel names the person where the group starts and says they/them after.

Known limitations

• ⌘A in a Tree pane selects the top-level rows only , not the children of expanded folders. Which rows are expanded is private to the view, so “everything visible” would be a guess. Columns resolves through the deepest open column.
• Edit's four items are never greyed out. A menu item cannot know where the caret is when it renders, so disabling Copy with no files selected would grey it out while somebody is typing in the ⌘K field.
• ⌘K cannot switch to the source a typed path is in. It is listed and marked “In <source> — switch source first” rather than delivered.

Tabs

• ▭Every pane gets a tab strip. A tab is a location a pane holds, parked: its folder, its column stack, its history and its selection. The strip draws nothing at one tab, and sheds down three rungs as space runs out.
• ⌘Finder's chords, and a route that works at one tab. ⌘T opens a tab here, ⌘W closes the tab rather than the window once there is more than one, ⇧⌘[ and ⇧⌘] walk the strip, ⇧⌘T shows the bar at a single tab. ⌃⇥ cycles tabs in Browse, where it had always been dead; Compare keeps it as the pane switch. Tabs pin. New Tab is also on the header card's right-click menu and the pane's empty-area menu — with no ＋ on screen until a second tab exists, those are the whole discovery story.
• ⇹In Compare, both panes wear the strip together. A strip on one side only pushes that pane down 34pt, from which every row names a different folder on the left than on the right. Opening a folder in a new tab follows the link, too.
• ↺The strip survives a quit — each tab's source, its folder, the depth of its column stack, and whether it was pinned. Selection, history and a typed search stay with the session.

Safety

• 🔒A folder the app cannot read no longer counts as an empty one. Listing a folder you have no permission to read hands back a good listing that yields nothing, so at four places the “if this failed” branch was never taken. The folder-replace warning said “0 items will be removed” — the last sentence you read before replacing a folder.
• ↶Undo could destroy the very thing it existed to protect. The check that stops ⌘Z discarding a file you have changed compared a stored byte size, and both cases with no size to compare fell through to the delete. A copied folder had no check at all: copy to a NAS, let files land inside, press ⌘Z, and on a volume with no Trash they are gone.
• ⚠⌘Z is no longer offered for a removal it cannot take back. On a volume with no Trash a removal escalates to a permanent delete, and nothing had gone onto the undo stack — so ⌘Z reversed whatever was still on it, which after a filing run is that whole run moving back. The merge's version was worse: undoing a merge deletes the copies it folded in, so with the originals already gone ⌘Z took the only ones left. The duplicate resolve also compared two copies by size alone, and now reads the modification date.
• 📐Apply recommended told you it had freed space it had not. A group whose copies something else had already removed still counts as resolved, but reclaimed nothing — while its recorded size went into the total anyway. Two pairs with one copy gone reported “Reclaimed 5 KB from 2 groups” for a run that trashed one 1 KB file. It also gave the wrong advice when it removed nothing: “these groups changed since they were scanned” was shown for every empty batch, where the usual reason is the opposite one — every copy is protected, so nothing has changed.
• 🔎The log says when a document could not be read , rather than reading like a document with nothing in it. A file the filing scan cannot open contributed no text, so the suggestion was made from the filename alone with nothing saying why. Three readers were silent about it; now all four speak.
• ⚙Automations no longer rebuild a provider that has gone away, or lose every rule to one unreadable value. Applying a batch created the destination unchecked, so a provider unmounted between preview and apply was recreated as an ordinary local folder — and this is a move, so files left a live tree for a dead one, reported as a success with ⌘Z offered.
• 🧭Tree and Columns agree on where the pane is. Browse three columns deep, flip to Tree, and the breadcrumb still named the folder the columns had stopped in — with ‹ lit but dead, crumb clicks landing on nothing, and Scan offering to walk the wrong folder.
• ☁An unreadable `~/Library/CloudStorage` made your cloud accounts disappear. The same empty listing, behind the one site that reads and writes back — so every mounted Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive vanished at once, with the synthesized iCloud entry left behind to make the truncated list look plausible.
• 🛡The cross-person veto never fired for a folder that did not exist yet. The rule opened with an exact lookup, and a profile describes the folders that do exist — so every proposed-new-folder destination skipped the veto, with no refusal and no log line.

Organize's scope, and the palette's pins

• ◈A row menu in the pane that did not have focus wiped Organize's scope. A context menu does not move focus, and the scope setter read the focused pane's root — so right-clicking a folder in the other pane normalised it against the wrong root, which answers “nothing”. It survived a relaunch.
• ▤Right-click ▸ Open in Browse or Storage re-aimed every Organize lens. The write was gated on a layout flag that predates Browse existing. Paths resolved correctly, so nothing looked wrong; the lenses were simply answering about another folder, and that survived a relaunch too.
• 📌A folder pinned in the breadcrumb now reads as pinned in the pane. The app carries two spellings of the same root — a folder source keeps its `~`, while every surface that touches the disk expands it first — so a pin written under one spelling was invisible to readers holding the other.

Panes and the pane bar

• 👁Browse keeps its preview column when Compare turns one off. One stored preference served four surfaces that want two different answers: Compare's panes are read against something, where a preview costs half the room, while Browse is the pane where reading a file is the task.
• ▤A column row spends its width on the name. Folder rows carried the folder's own mtime, which reports the last tidy rather than anything about the contents — and it cost the name about 76pt of a 210pt column, enough to truncate “Birth Certificate”.
• 🏷The pane bar's controls now show their names — a short word under each pill, as Finder's toolbar does, turned off from the bar's right-click menu and the first thing the bar sheds on a narrow pane.
• ⌖A fixed space on the customize track can be aimed at. Its pill is a dashed outline with no fill, and a shape is hit-testable only where it is painted — so the drag that removes it and its menu were attached to a 1pt ring. A space once added could never be taken off.
• ⋯The pane bar's ⋯ is now only about width. It held two unrelated things under one glyph: controls too narrow to draw, and controls you had deliberately removed in Customize — so the sheet could not actually remove anything. Removing is removing now, and Customize Pane Bar… has moved to the bar's right-click menu.

People

• 👤A repeated id in `people.json` now names one person. The roster is a file you can edit by hand, and every reader answered a duplicate differently — so one row showed the first record's name above the last record's facts, and the second person never reached the screen.
• ⚠A person listed twice was switched off by the duplicate. A given name is published only when exactly one id claims it, so somebody listed twice claimed their own name twice and the claim was dropped — their matching silently disabled by the entry that looks like it reinforces them.
• 🛡And opening Settings ▸ People no longer crashes on such a file. That pane built its facts with a dictionary initialiser that traps on a duplicate key, so a copy-pasted person block whose id was not changed took the whole app down.

Known limitations

• ⌃⇧⇥ does not cycle tabs backwards. The pair has to split the way ⌃⇥ does, and there is no reverse pane switch to mirror. ⇧⌘[ and ⇧⌘] cycle both directions everywhere, so this is a missing second route rather than a missing capability.
• ⌘-double-click opens a new tab in Columns only. The tree view drives navigation from single taps and disclosure, and a second recognizer there has to be proved not to cost either. Right-click ▸ Open in New Tab works in both views.
• ⌘W closes the window when the focused pane holds one tab , whatever the other pane holds — so in Compare, a focused pane with one tab and a sibling with five takes the window and all six. That is Finder's rule; the header card's Close Tab withholds itself at one tab, so this is the chord only.

Four workspaces

• ▤Organize changes one tree on the app's suggestion, and it is the only place that does. Compare holds two side by side, Storage reports on one, Browse looks at one. Duplicates and Rules are lenses inside Organize now, and your stored workspace migrates forward.
• 📁Browse is a fourth workspace with no lens and no opinion. One tree at full width, nothing proposing anything. A new install opens here rather than on a comparison of two clouds it has not scanned yet; upgrades resume where you left them.
• ☰A five-item rail inside Organize — To File, Duplicates, Renames, Restructure, Rules. Permanent items, not the chips that came before: a chip only exists once a scan has found something, so “organize this folder” had nowhere to land before running anything.
• ◈The rail's unselected state is an overview, over one scope that you set. One page carrying each lens's answer, in three states that never borrow one another's words: never ran, ran and clean, or findings. The scope survives a relaunch, and browsing never moves it.

A household, not a bag of names

• 👤SyncCloud now knows who the people in your documents are. New, not improved: v3.1 filed by what a document was about and could not ask whose it was. A household keeps each person's name forms, their aliases, and how they are related.
• ⚖Names are matched phrase-first, longest wins, and a match is consumed. In a real family one word is several people. In “Daughter Father” the surname is spent on Daughter and never doubles as evidence for her father — without which every shared surname is evidence for everyone carrying it.
• ⚙︎People is its own place in Settings , and a row with folders behind it says what it buys: the name forms tried against a document, how many folders are theirs, how many documents are filed in them. Edits take effect without a relaunch.
• ◇A rule can say whose document it is, and file into {person}. “Is Daughter's document” rather than “mentions daughter” — not the same claim. It keys on the person, so it survives a rename, and one rule files each family member's card into their own folder.
• 🔍Search resolves a person. Type a name into ⌘F and a row appears beneath the field — “Daughter — everything that is theirs”, ⌘↩ to take it. The find itself is untouched.

Filing that reads your tree

• ◈Loose files are routed by what a folder already contains, before any model is asked — on a tree that has been surveyed. It weighs what each folder is against the distinguishing words of the documents already filed there: 61.9% first try, 81.8% in the top three, measured over 7,370 filed documents choosing among some 2,950 folders.
• 💬The model re-ranks that shortlist instead of answering past it , and is shown only folders the file could actually go in — listing an inbox teaches a classifier to file into the place things go when they have nowhere to go.
• ⚙︎Rules are learned from what a folder has received — the same surveyed record — rather than from one word in the folder's name, and a learned year becomes {year} rather than the year the example happened to have.
• 👁A scanned PDF can be read on request. A PDF with no text layer reaches the classifier as a bare filename, so its suggestion is a guess about a document nobody read. The scan records which files would benefit and spends nothing; a Read scan button appears on exactly those.
• 🛡A suggestion that would file one person's document into another's folder is refused , consulting the page the scan already read when the filename names nobody. The filename outranks the page: a page-1 mention is testimony — an application prints its sponsor — while a filename is your own label.

Renames, and a tree that disagrees with itself

• ✎A rename is proposed alongside the move. Organize could say where a loose file belongs but not what to call it once it got there, so the house convention decayed exactly where the volume is. There is a backlog pass over folders already filed under raw names, with risky names folded in as a to-fix section.
• ▦The rules came from the tree, not from a description of it, and two changed as a result. The ordinal is a position, not a month — of 327 such folders, 118 of the 132 that can tell the readings apart number by position. And 567 files carry a one-digit ordinal, which misorders past September.
• ▥Restructure arrives, report-only. It reports families of sibling folders shaped differently in different years, under two rules validated against a real tree: axis values are not structure, and difference is not divergence. It does not yet propose a plan.

The copies a hash cannot see

• ⧉The same document downloaded twice is now found. Providers re-generate a PDF on every download, so the same bill fetched twice is byte-different with identical content — and the scan reported a clean result that was silently wrong. SyncCloud now fingerprints what a document says, not just its bytes.
• 🛡It is a weaker claim, and it says so. Matches group as same text rather than identical, with their own badge and a standing exclusion from Apply recommended. Over a real tree of 10,569 PDFs it finds about 250 groups the content hash cannot see — and it never split a byte-identical pair: 485 tested, 0 disagreed.
• 🛡The copies about to be trashed are re-verified, not just the keeper. A duplicate group is a point-in-time snapshot whose results outlive the scan. Rewrite one of the copies in that window and its path still exists — so it was trashed under a banner calling it redundant when it was the only instance of its new content.

Compare

• ⊘You can stop a scan. The Compare scan walks two entire trees and is the longest thing the app does, and it had no Cancel — so starting one against the wrong roots meant waiting it out or quitting. The pane rung becomes Stop, and says how long it has been running.
• ◔Compare opens on what the last scan found — a count and how long ago, in the past tense — instead of “Nothing scanned yet”. Never the rows: a three-day-old “Copy 412 to →” is exactly the stale-world apply the caches exist to prevent.
• ⚠A partial transfer shows which rows failed. The alert named the first failure and pointed at the Activity Log, so finding the other eleven of four hundred meant reading a log in another window. A Failed to transfer filter now selects them, and the table gains a Path column.

⌘K, and the keyboard

• ⌘One field that reaches your whole tree. ⌘K offers folders to jump to, people on your roster, your sources, the app's own places and its actions. Groups are ordered by their best match, and a row reached through a keyword draws no emphasis, because its visible text genuinely did not match.
• ⇥Menu-bar shortcuts for the things you were already doing , shown as keycaps during the ⌥-hold reveal: ⌘1–⌘4 for workspaces, ⌘[ / ⌘] for the focused pane's history, ⌘R rescan, ⇧⌘N new folder, ⇧⌘F fold all, ⌘⌫ delete, ⌘I and ⌘L for the inspector and the log. ⌃⇥ moves focus between panes, which had no keyboard path at all.

What it costs, and what it reads

• $The Organize scan no longer spends money. “Suggest homes” reached Claude whenever the cloud toggle was on, so the only button that produced results was also the button that billed you. The scan is entirely on-device now; Refine, on the results, is what re-asks the model.
• ⚡A document is read once, and says the same thing twice. PDFKit's text extraction is not thread-safe and was being driven from a concurrent queue: over a real 10,286-document tree, 0.83% came back with different text than a serial pass. Extraction now runs in one lane.

Find in the panes

• 🔍⌘F searches inside a pane's tree — as a find, not a filter. Every list in the app already had search; the two panes, the hardest and most useful half, had none. Matches keep their place in the tree: the matched run is bolded, everything off the path dims but stays readable, and a collapsed folder with hits says “2 matches” rather than hiding them.
• ↩↩ and ⇧↩ walk the hits , opening only the folders on the way to each one, in Tree and Columns alike. In Compare, each hit says “both sides” or “left only” — which side a copy is missing from is usually the reason for searching at all.
• ☁A search never touches the disk. It runs over the tree the pane has already loaded, so a query cannot make a cloud provider download anything.
• ▤The magnifier joins the pane bar, including — once — on a bar you had customized before it existed. Remove it and it stays removed; ⌘F works either way.

Nothing unchanged is paid for twice

• ↺Organize reuses suggestions for files that haven't changed. A file with the same content, under the same model and instructions, gets the suggestion it got last time — without asking the model, which with Claude selected means without paying for it. A “reused” pill says what the scan got for free.
• $The price is on the button that spends it. Organize's setup card quotes your last cloud run — file count, model, cost — before you start, instead of after. On a genuine first run it says the run is billed rather than inventing a number.
• ⚡Verify and Duplicates stop re-reading gigabytes they have already read. File digests persist across launches, so a rescan of an unchanged tree skips the reads entirely — and a cancelled scan keeps what it measured, because the reading had already happened. Merges keep their digests too.
• ◔Storage opens with your last report instead of an empty panel , marked with how old the reading is — “Scanned 2h ago”, amber once stale. Storage is the one lens whose results are safe to restore: its only action is Reveal in Finder, so a stale row cannot misdirect a destructive apply.
• ⚙︎Everything kept is visible and clearable. Saved suggestions live under Settings ▸ Organize; the file digests and saved Storage reports under Settings ▸ Advanced ▸ Saved scan data, each with its size on disk and a Clear. Clearing costs time on the next scan and nothing else.

Hold ⌥ to see every shortcut

• ⌥Hold ⌥ for a fifth of a second and every control with a keyboard shortcut grows a key badge ; release and they vanish. An opaque keycap takes the control's place, so nothing shifts and nothing is half-covered. Starting a chord, clicking or typing cancels the reveal.
• 💬The shortcuts were already there; now they are discoverable in passing : every badged control's tooltip names the shortcut beside the action. VoiceOver hears each one unconditionally, since a held modifier is not a discovery path a screen reader can use.

Where a file lives

• ℹThe Info inspector answers “where does this file live?” — This Mac only, This Mac · iCloud, or OneDrive only — as the conclusion of two facts shown above it: the path, and whether the content is downloaded. “This Mac only” means the path is inside no cloud-synced folder, never “unprotected”.
• ⌂Rows in a folder source carry a small ⌂ when a file is on this Mac only — the mirror of the ☁ cloud-only badge, and free: pure path arithmetic, no syscall per row. Inside a cloud source's own pane it never appears, because there it would mark everything and mean nothing.
• ✓A disabled source still counts as a second copy. Its folder is on disk whether or not the checkbox is on, so disabling a provider cannot make its files report riskier than they are.

Find duplicates of this

• ⧉Every file row's context menu can ask “does this have copies?” — the question Duplicates answers in bulk, scoped to the one file you are looking at. If the current results already cover it you land on its group; if not, the right scan starts first.
• 🛡"No duplicates" is only ever said by a scan that actually looked. A file outside what was last scanned gets "wasn't in the last scan" and a button that scans its own folder — not a confident all-clear borrowed from results that never saw it.

Appearance & fixes

• 🎨The segmented pickers in Settings follow the app's accent. Choosing Cyan used to recolour the rail and leave Theme, Text size and List density in system blue. The "None" accent keeps the stock macOS look untouched — that being the point of "None".
• 🎨The seam between the panes wears its swap/link capsule in the app hue again. v3.0 had rested it on a neutral grey wash to sit level with the nav pills; floating over pane content on an already-tinted window, grey read as unstyled rather than as quiet.
• ✓Switching providers no longer leaves the previous provider's Storage report on screen. Every other lens cleared its results on a source switch; Storage kept showing numbers measured somewhere else, under a folder chip naming a root the window no longer showed.

Requires macOS 26

• ⚠The app now declares the floor it is actually built against. `project.yml` and all seven packages said macOS 15 while the code had been written against 26 for some time, so thirteen availability guards and their fallback branches were still being compiled for an OS this app was never going to run on.

One row of workspaces

• ▤Compare, Organize, Duplicates, Automations and Storage are five segments in one bar. They used to be two levels: a Compare | Tidy container picker with the lenses nested underneath, which left Duplicates two clicks deep behind a word that named no task. The five were peers all along; only the nesting said otherwise.
• ↺Your selection survives the change. The stored workspace is migrated once at launch and every old value maps forward explicitly, so you open where you left off instead of being dropped on Compare mid-task.
• ⚙︎Settings follows the same names. The Tidy tab — the last place still using that word — is now Organize and Duplicates, each wearing its workspace's glyph. Settings go where the work is, so Compare, Automations and Storage get no tab of their own.

Risky names

• ⚠Names the cloud will reject are reported instead of waiting to be looked for. Rename was a tab you had to remember to visit for a problem you hit a few times a year. Organize's scan already walks the whole provider and the name rules are pure, so the names come back on that pass — no second walk, no second button.
• ◈Both panes, Columns and the Differences table now mark the offender on sight, with the reason on the tooltip. Previously a name that would break a sync looked exactly like every other name until you ran Organize.
• ✓“Fix name…” works. The row context-menu item had never once appeared: declared in a protocol extension, where a member has no witness-table entry, so every call through the delegate bound statically to the extension's nil default. It was unreachable from the day it was written.
• ☰Settings ▸ Organize lists the names you have kept. Keeping a name has always been reversible, but a kept name draws no badge — so “what have I kept?” could only be answered by walking your files and reading a context menu per file.

Any folder is a source

• 📁A pane, a scan or a lens can be pointed at any folder on this Mac, not just a cloud account. The source list was built by enumerating `~/Library/CloudStorage` plus a hardcoded iCloud entry, so `~` or `~/Projects` could never be a source. Two doors now: Settings ▸ Sources ▸ Add Folder… for deliberate setup, and Choose Folder… where you are working.
• ⚖A new “Check folder names against” setting decides whose rules a folder is judged by. A folder has no naming rules of its own, so judging names against it would report an empty all-clear over a folder full of names OneDrive would reject. The useful question is “would this survive being put somewhere?”
• ⊘Reset All Settings says that it removes your folder sources. It always did; the confirmation previously reassured you that files on disk are untouched and stopped there.

Scanning is faster

• ⚡94% of path components need no normalizing at all, and the scan now checks that before doing the work rather than normalizing everything: 673,925 of 719,361 components on two real provider roots of about 40,000 nodes each. Name comparison went from about 500 ms to about 130 ms, and the whole pass roughly doubled in speed (1.0–1.6 s before, 0.53–0.82 s after, across four interleaved runs).
• ⚡Flattening a cached tree for the scan costs less than half what it did — 809 ms → 377 ms and 1,194 ms → 466 ms on those two roots. In the live app the scan's flatten phase went from 1.18 s to 0.51 s.
• ⚡File paths are stored as native Swift strings, so the scan stops paying to bridge them back from Foundation on every comparison: about 135 ms and 181 ms off a full load-and-scan on the two roots.
• ⚡A debug log line no longer costs a tree walk when logging is off. It built its message — about 5 ms per 40,000 nodes — before the level gate had a chance to drop it.

Data safety

• 🛡Verify All's “copy the identical files” offer can no longer act on a stale verdict. Undoing a file operation while a verify pass was running left the offer describing files that had since moved, and confirming it could overwrite the bytes the undo had just restored. It is re-checked when the write is ordered, not at the click.
• ⊘A cancelled Verify All no longer offers a partial batch. Cancelling at 40% of 500 files still published the verdicts it had reached, so the confirmation dialog opened over the top of the "cancelled" banner, offering a bulk write of whatever it had got through.

Cloud files

• ☁A pane watches every download it starts, not just the most recent one, so a second download no longer leaves the first one's row badged cloud-only forever.
• ◇The ☁ badge stops answering from a stale memo — a file that has landed reads as local, and a path the app could not stat is no longer remembered as though it had answered.

Columns

• 👁Opening the preview no longer hides the column it is describing. The preview takes its width off the stack, which covered the deepest column — the one holding the file you selected — so you had to scroll right by hand to read what the preview was about.

Appearance

• 🎨The accent picker shows what it does. Under the twelve swatches there is now a live preview — a filled transfer button beside a differences pill — and a caption naming what the colour is actually used for. It was the only section on the tab that explained itself neither in words nor by example.

Settings

• ⚙︎The app reports its real version. Every release from v0.10 to v2.8 installed an app that called itself 1.0 (build 1) — in Settings, in ~/sync-cloud.log, and in Finder's Version column. This one says 2.9.
• 🔍Tidy's loose-files inbox is searchable. Searching "inbox", "loose files", or "TODO" in Settings found nothing, in every 2.x release the control has shipped in.

Launch at login

• ↺A login-item update that fails no longer discards the toggle you set while it was in flight. The failure path re-read the service's real state and overwrote your switch with it, silently throwing the change away.

Automations

• ⚙︎A rule imported, bulk-toggled, or undone no longer re-writes itself. An external change to a rule's enabled state was echoed back as though you had flipped the switch — at worst re-entering the very undo that caused it.

Performance

• ⚡The comparison bar lays out nearly three times faster , and you feel it wherever the comparison redraws. It worked out which layout fit by building six whole toolbars and measuring them; it now computes the width arithmetically. Measured at 900pt: 68.4ms → 23.9ms per layout pass.

Fixes

• ✓The destination picker's search says when it is showing a partial answer instead of presenting the first N matches as all of them, and its cards stop double-bordering.

Removed

• ✕Cross-pane drag & drop is gone. In practice it had not worked for a long time — the drag would lift, but no target ever accepted the drop — so what was on screen was an affordance that did nothing. Use the transfer buttons or the new destination picker.

Data safety

• 🛡Three ways a mutation path could destroy what it was saving are closed.

Sending files somewhere

• 📁Organize gets a destination picker of its own instead of the system panel, floated over the window and dressed in the app's own surfaces. It names what a move is about to collide with before you confirm it.
• →The Tidy rail can send a file somewhere, and a cross-pane transfer now says where it actually puts things.

Preview

• 👁A selected file previews beside the columns — in the Tidy rail and in the comparison panes, with the toggle in the pane header.

A pane bar you arrange

• ▤The pane bar is a canvas you arrange yourself — drag the controls you use onto it, drop the ones you don't, from a customize sheet.

Performance

• ⚡The file panes stop re-rendering on unrelated state, the inspector's stat moves off the main thread, and the panes stop re-arming a timer and re-statting every frame.
• ⧉Tidy and the merge planner now use the content-hash cache, so neither pays again for hashing the other already did, and the merge planner stops re-asking what the directory walk already told it.
• ▸A row's fonts resolve once per pane instead of once per row, bulk progress is throttled to one update per percent, and the pane bar computes the rung it needs instead of building ten to find it.

Fixes

• ✓The Tidy rail stops striking out and badging rows with comparison state it has no business showing.
• ␣Space previews the file the app says is current. The overlay cards stop throwing away the Clear setting, and a superseded metadata load can no longer claim the memo ahead of the current one.

Columns

• ▥A new pane view mode, and the default — panes render as columns, the way Finder does, so you can see the path you took instead of just where you landed.
• ⇄Drilling into a folder mirrors onto the linked pane, keeping both sides in step.
• 📍The header shows one location for the pane, and the pane arrows understand columns before they consult the focus history.
• ▢A click on empty space puts the selection down, and a linked breadcrumb click reaches the folder it names.

Scrolling that behaves

• ↕The column stack scrolls the way AppKit scrolls, bounce included, and is pulled home when the platform's bounce strands it.
• 🔒A wheel gesture locks to its dominant axis, so a vertical scroll does not nudge the stack sideways.

Clicks

• ✓One pane's deferred clear no longer eats the other pane's next click, and the action bar's buttons stop moving when the summary changes.

Data safety

• 🛡External-volume providers claim their own tree again. A depth rule introduced in v2.6 meant a provider mounted under /Volumes claimed nothing — so a path-addressed CLI root inside it silently lost its destination-name guard and date-noise filter. (Regression introduced in v2.6.)
• ⚠› can no longer walk into a folder that no longer exists. Stepping back out of a folder that is then deleted left the forward arrow lit and pointing at a dead path — where New Folder, paste, and background drops act.

Tidy accounting & security

• ⧉A group whose copies are all protected no longer vanishes from the list with its bytes credited as reclaimed while every copy is still on disk; protected copies stop being counted as reclaimable, and a Trash button that would do nothing is no longer enabled.
• ⚡A corrupt store stopped rewriting its whole backup on every read — tens of thousands of writes per scan.
• 🔑The copied API key is marked concealed on the pasteboard, so clipboard managers know not to retain it.

Differences

• ▤Grouped into top-level folder sections, so a long comparison reads as a handful of folders instead of one flat wall of rows.
• ⇕Sections are selectable and collapsible, with Collapse All on the differences bar.

Settings & Appearance

• ▥Settings stood on a left rail, so a tab is never cut in half again — with more air between sections and room for a provider path to be read.
• 🔤A Text size setting.
• ◇The seam pill is quiet at rest and the accent means "linked"; on Clear glass the provider capsule gets a ground, and chrome ink is brighter in dark.

Keychain & performance

• 🔑Opening the Tidy tab no longer demands your Keychain password, and the API key gains a reveal plus a replace that says so.
• ⚡SwiftUI no longer deep-compares 40,000 file nodes on the main thread — folder subtrees stay out of row comparison, OutlineGroup is not handed the raw graph, and the Details sidebar resolves selection through an index.

Data safety

• 🛡A bulk sync could overwrite one file with another and report success. When a batch mixed a case-sensitive mount with the case-insensitive boot volume, two names differing only by case both passed the uniqueness check and the workers wrote to the same file — with a Move, both sources consumed. Each destination is now asked about its own volume.

Fixes

• ✓Clearing the stored API key now reports whether it actually succeeded. The transfer buttons spell out Copy.

Colour

• 🎨Terracotta replaces amber as the attention colour, and accent fills are deepened so every filled control carries a legible white label — with on-accent text paired to the fill's own luminance.
• ●Freshness badge redesigned — scan freshness lives in the status dot, the badge carries its own colour, and the scan action follows it.
• ◇Clear reads as glass, with its background carrying the accent.

Chrome

• ◈Pane nav controls are drawn in-app rather than fought from outside — levelled pill heights, tinted glyphs, and a real hover state on every chrome-less and system-chrome button.
• ▤Differences bar zoned, its primary action fixed left-to-right; the difference count gained the capsule a stale badge wears, and the sort menu matches its neighbours.
• ▸The action bar says which pane it is about to act on, and places itself from rows that are actually on screen.
• ⇕The differences pane stays open during a guided review.
• 📜The Activity Log's search reveal is animated, and its severity chips count the history you have actually revealed.

Filing, accessibility & fixes

• ✨Cloud Filing's Opus option moved to Opus 5, with the generation named in the model picker.
• ♿︎The transfer buttons are named for VoiceOver, and the compaction ladder is pinned.
• 📁A filing walkthrough no longer resumes over a preview it no longer describes.
• 🛡Bulk-sync exclusion closed in both directions; a sweep can stand down mid-operation; case is folded when deciding a file is already filed.
• ↺A history wipe asks first, New Folder's undo no longer swallows its outcome, and a delete that found nothing says so.
• 📜Clearing the log clears the one you can see; a log the app could not read is told apart from one holding nothing.

• ▤Redesigned Compare action bar — appears the instant a file is clicked, sits away from the selected row, and the selection can be cleared.
• ⇕The differences pane can be collapsed — a show/hide chevron replaces the drag-only divider, and the last file stays visible.
• 📜Activity Log chrome — title bar hidden, search collapsed behind a magnifier, translucent Settings-style surfaces, and long messages wrap instead of being cut off.
• 🎨The app accent carries through the compare chrome and row selection, replacing the OS gray.
• ✕New Folder is gone from the Compare action bar, and the pane link toggle is hidden in Tidy's single-source rail.
• ◧A new flat two-pane app icon, a rewritten README, and a visual GitHub Pages feature site.

• 🌘Dark mode reworked — a deeper base, accent glow, specular-edged cards, and a bolder translucent veil on Clear glass.
• ◼︎Graphite accent — a new hue for a genuinely neutral, monochrome look.
• ♿︎Accessibility — a caution tier in the semantic colour table, a shared 3:1 contrast floor, and VoiceOver-proof compact fallbacks.
• ↺A failed replace can no longer lose your file — the staged temp is preserved when the source can't be restored. Undo Last Run is paired with its own run rather than a name on the stack.
• ⧉Duplicates hardened again — cross-folder version groups stop pooling unmarked originals, and merges refuse to aim through keeper hard links; v2.2’s unreadable-folder fix is widened to case- and near-name variants.

Theming

• ◐Light / Dark / Follow macOS — a Theme control sets the app's appearance independent of the system, updating everything live, down to the title bar.
• ◇Clear glass lets the desktop through, with frosted controls and carded chrome.
• ⌘Compare | Tidy moved into the title bar, and all five Tidy lenses now sit under one header card.

One visual language

• ✓Unified badge pills, one lens-card surface, one semantic severity table, a shared close button and search field, real empty states, and a canonical type ramp.
• ☀Accent, on-accent, and treemap label colours are derived from actual luminance, so text stays legible on any hue.
• ▤Comfortable / compact list density extended to the file panes, Activity Log, Sync History, lens cards, and the differences table.
• ⛃Clear Filters, kind: made last-wins, and a chip's ✕ now removing every occurrence of its word; Automations gained Preview / Reveal inspection.
• 🛡Scans that tell the truth — unreadable directories no longer mint phantom "Missing" rows (the scan root included), permission-denied directories are treated as unexplored rather than empty, dataless oversize files classified cloud-only rather than "too large", and a merge refused when a source's mtime changed.

• 🔎Token search everywhere — Compare, the Activity Log, and Tidy duplicates gained a chip-based search with removable tokens, suggestions, kind: filters, and size tokens.
• ⏱"Scanned N ago" freshness pill on the pane header, plus selection size on the action bar and a folder quick-jump menu.
• 🖼Content thumbnails in duplicate cards, and "Compare copies" hands a group straight to the Compare tab.
• 🛡Safer grouping — symlinks and cloud-only placeholders are no longer mistaken for duplicates, skipped-file counts are surfaced instead of going silently blind, and a redundant copy is re-verified right before a merge trashes it.
• ☁︎Cloud-only files are flagged, with a best-effort Download; the badge clears once the file lands.
• ⚙︎One rule system — remembered rules and automations unified, every learned rule surfaced for review.
• ↺Undo covers everything — a full move / copy / delete undo-then-redo matrix, plus Undo on completion banners.

• ▦Persistent tab strip with a single-source rail replaces the provider sidebar, at a fixed height.
• ◫Self-contained panes — scanning and per-pane actions moved onto the pane headers; the title bar pared down to Logs and Settings.
• ⇎Differences is now Compare, with Details folded into a dedicated inspector; Get Info routes there and the pane is resizable.
• ✎The Name Normalizer returns as its own Rename sub-tab, and Organize's loose-files scan defaults to a configurable TODO inbox.
• ▶Previewed automations are filed for real, one file at a time, anchored at the provider root.
• 💡After filing a loose file, SyncCloud offers to learn an Automation rule — and only asks when the file actually moved. The dead first click when selecting in a pane is fixed.

• ▦Storage Lens — a treemap of what's eating your disk, with reclaim-candidate lists.
• ↺Sync History — durable and exportable, with run-level undo: "Undo Last Run" names the run it will reverse and itemizes it before it fires.
• ✎Name normalizer as a batch lens, with per-row Quick Look and Show in Finder.
• ⚙︎Automations arrive as a preview-only lens — rich rule cards, grouped results, per-rule preview, and a Browse button for the destination.
• $Cloud spend guardrails — a pre-flight estimate before a scan, a monthly cap, and a lifetime cap defaulting to $5; plus a per-tab toggle to hide the top file panes.
• ⚡Activity Log gained "Show older history" paging, and re-verification is instant — SHA-256 cached by path + mtime + size.

• 👋A first-run feature tour, with a vector illustration per page, brand glyphs, and motion.
• ?In-app Help — a Help overlay and enriched Help menu, plus Help ▸ Welcome to re-summon the first-run card.
• 🎨Provider brand hues tint provider identity throughout, adapting to light and dark.
• ◇Unified empty states, and comfortable / compact list density.

• ✨The Filing lens suggests a destination for every loose file, backed by on-device content signals.
• ⚘Two engines — on-device Apple LLM first, with an opt-in cloud (Claude) classifier for the hard cases.
• 📌Remembered rules — corrections stick, with a legible, editable home in plain words; "Try another" re-suggests with rejection learning.
• $Cost is visible and cheap — spend is surfaced as last-scan, total, and history, and the classifier defaults to Haiku to keep a scan to cents. A confidence meter and legend, Quick Look on Filing cards, and rescan-after-navigate.
• ⚙︎Settings ▸ Tidy — a dedicated tab for Duplicates, Filing, and cloud spend, plus a header search across all tabs.

• ⧉Duplicates lens — find and resolve duplicate folders and files within one provider, including overlapping-folder merges.
• ◉Keeper picker and a persistent "Keep separate" decision.
• ⏳Cancellable scans with determinate progress through the hashing phase.
• ⇎Differences polish — an actionable "No Scan Performed" state, per-side totals, per-filter counts, directional keyboard copy/move, and a visible "navigate both panes" toggle.

• 👁Inline guided review for working through differences one at a time.
• ▬The action bar moved into the native window toolbar; invisible dividers, a per-pane hidden-files toggle, and expanded Settings — conflict policy, startup restore, notifications, shortcuts. A “None” accent for the stock-macOS look, Reveal in Finder and Quick Look on tree rows, and a CLI that validates roots and exits nonzero on failure.
• 🛡Safety, which is what makes this 1.0 — atomic destination replacement, replaced files kept recoverable, permanent deletes gated on Trash-less volumes, and orphaned .tmp_ files swept.
• ⚡Scan is ~8× faster on large directories.

• ▤Differences rebuilt as a dense, searchable, sortable table, with header stat pills, a right-click menu, directional arrows, and an aggregate multi-select summary.
• ⚙︎Settings becomes an in-window overlay with a General tab; failures surface as structured errors carrying their own actions.
• ↔Per-pane back/forward history, real file icons and metadata, and a ⇄ pane swap.
• 🎨Appearance gains a content surface-style picker, a tint slider, and accent-aware toolbars.

• ◍Per-row sync status badges, and provider names replacing "Left/Right" in action labels.
• ✥Drag & drop between panes, double-click drill-down, and breadcrumb navigation.
• ⚡Streaming checksums, plus symlink and case-variant fixes — including a false all-missing diff.

• ⇎Compare folders with ignore rules, diff refresh, and Copy / Move in an action bar.
• ▰Progress bar, overwrite confirmation, and Copy/Move-All with apply-all.
• ◇Provider-branded panes and the first Liquid Glass design pass.
• ⌨︎A headless SyncCloudCLI.

• ▣Select many files at once and move them as a batch.
• ⓘDetails tab, Move-to-source / Move-to-destination, and the first app icon.

• ✂v0.1 – v0.5 — the dual-pane file manager core: Finder-style cut / copy / paste with native paste-conflict handling, context menus, and right-click.
• ↺v0.6 – v0.8 — Get Info, and undo / redo across all file operations.
• 🛡v0.9 – v0.11 — consistent logging and error handling, security fixes, and a pass over comments.
• 👁v0.12 – v0.16 — hidden-file toggle, Quick Look, the app icon, and the first real test suite.