What is DiskTop?

DiskTop is a desk accessory that provides simple, yet powerful ways to locate and manage your files and hard disk(s) much like DiskTracker but in real time.

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DiskTop is a simple but powerful file-management utility that lets you copy, move, rename, delete, and find files — without using the Finder. Furthermore, when you need to organize large numbers of files on different volumes, DiskTop handles virtually all of these tasks more quickly and effectively than the Finder does.

Longtime DiskTop users know how handy this unassuming desk accessory can be. With the release of version 4.5, DiskTop is even more powerful, and its revamped interface design gives it a polish it lacked before.

You access DiskTop from the Apple menu or by using the built-in hot-key combination ⌘-shift-D. The lower half of the program’s main screen contains a window that displays a directory of each disk connected to your Mac (similar to a list view in the Finder). The top half of the DiskTop screen contains a set of 3-D-style buttons you click on to perform various file-management tasks.

You can now fully customize the interface with ten different custom list views, each containing only the file information you want to display. You can rearrange the order of columns by dragging them, and you can make the columns as wide or narrow as you want.

A number of improved features speed up most jobs. For example, there are keyboard shortcuts for all the major file-management tasks. When you press the ⌘ key, DiskTop displays the shortcuts right on the main interface buttons, so it’s easy to learn the shortcuts.

The improved interface makes navigating your folders easier, too. By adding the names of frequently accessed folders to the main Drive pop-up menu, you can jump straight to the listed folders.

DiskTop’s search functions outperform the Finder’s Find command. You can simultaneously search for files by any combination of name, creation date, modification date, type, creator, and size. (The Finder handles only one kind of search at a time.) Once you find the files you want, you can retain the results of the search and add to the current found set with subsequent searches.

DiskTop is also great for handling System 7 aliases; the program lets you create and move aliases with a single command, saving you the trouble of first creating an alias and then dragging it into the desired location.

Of course, the program also enables you to do some things you can’t do with the Finder at all — like making folders and files completely invisible, or editing the four-letter type and creator codes the Macintosh uses to identify files. (You occasionally need to do this to repair a damaged file.)

The new version also makes it easier to export file information to other applications. File lists that are displayed by DiskTop can now be exported as tab-delimited text files.

PrairieSoft is shipping DiskTop with two add-on modules. DiskLaunch is a utility that allows you to bypass the Finder to launch applications and open files. From anywhere on screen, you can access a pop-up menu listing your most frequently used applications and documents. Just select the ones you want from the menu, and DiskLaunch opens them.

The other module, Gofer, is a text-search-and-retrieval utility program from Microlytics that allows you to search for strings of text within documents. There are two disappointments, though: Gofer provides no printed manual — just a lengthy documentation file on one of the installation disks. And more important, the version of Gofer that ships with DiskTop, 2.0, is incompatible with all 68040-based Macs. You have to send in a coupon to get the free 040 upgrade, which was still being beta-tested when this review was written.

But even without DiskLaunch and Gofer, DiskTop is a valuable package that makes organizing a crammed hard drive a more manageable task.

Schorr, Joseph. (July 1994). DiskTop 4.5. Macworld. (pg. 85).

Download DiskTop for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.0 up to Mac OS 9.2

Compatibility notes

Architecture: Desk Accessory (DA)

Note: This desk accessory may crash due to a memory issue under some versions of Mac OS.  There is a patch in the downloads to fix this problem.

 

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver