v4.4 — Every workspace gets a folder sidebar

Every workspace gets a folder sidebar. SyncCloud has always known which folders you keep
and which you were last in — it just had nowhere to put them, so the only routes were the pane
header's dropdown and the ⌘K field. There is now a column down the left of Browse, Compare,
Organize and Storage that holds all three answers at once: Favorites, the folders and places
you keep; Locations, every account you have signed into plus your home folder, your disks
and the Trash; and Recents, the folders you were last in.

Favorites and Recents span every source. A favorite in Dropbox is removable without visiting
Dropbox first, and Recents is one list ordered by when you were there rather than one list per
account — which is what a folder you were in five minutes ago actually means.

On the v4 line, so it requires macOS 26 — coming from 3.x or 2.x, read the v4.0 section
first.

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 in it can be taken out. Right-click any place in Locations to add it, or any
  place in Favorites to remove it; a place moves between the two sections rather than appearing
  in both. Restore Standard Folders, on the Favorites heading, brings the three back without
  disturbing what you have added, and is offered only when one of them 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 own rows can only manage folders that are already listed, and the pane
  header's jump menu acts on the folder the pane is showing rather than the one under the
  pointer — neither is where you are standing when you decide a folder is worth keeping.
• Each account draws its own mark. Dropbox's folds, Drive's triangle, OneDrive's lobe, all
  in one ink rather than five brand colours down a quiet column — and where two rows would read
  the same word, the account name is added beside it. Three Google Drive accounts all render
  "Google Drive" otherwise.
• 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 a recent dropped into Favorites becomes one, which is
  the quickest way in for a folder the sidebar already knows. The Locations order is the one
  Settings stores, so the sidebar and the pane header's dropdown cannot show the same accounts
  in two different sequences.
• 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 you have to remember. It is the same pane the file
  action bar, ⌘F, and the folder-scoped verbs act on — two separate answers to "which pane"
  before this, only one of which survived clicking into empty space.

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 that took. It now stops at a budget, and a
  folder the budget skipped is read on demand 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. On a large source that state lasts long
  enough to look like an answer. A column being read shows that it is, and a folder that
  genuinely cannot be listed says "Can't be read" rather than "Empty".
• Every whole-tree pass a workspace can start asks before walking a folder that large —
  Storage, Find Duplicates, Renames, Filing, and updating folder memory —
  instead of starting a pass that will take minutes with nothing on screen
  saying so. 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. Two
  things put it there. A folder that cannot be listed at all — permission denied — 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 there is only that the table admits it instead of looking
  complete. The second reason is new in this release: the comparison's own scan now stops at the
  same budget the pane does, so a source large enough to reach it is read in part and the same rule
  applies to the part that was not. 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 — so "less tint" had nothing left to take away, while the window behind those panes
  carried the accent at full strength whatever the slider said. That is why the two ends of the
  slider looked so alike. Every surface answers to it now: at Subtle the panes' own wash fades
  out entirely while the window behind them keeps a quarter of its strength — faint, but still
  recognisably the accent you picked, because a slider that ended in grey would
  quietly override the accent chosen directly above it. Vivid is unchanged, so a setting you
  already liked still paints what it painted. The bottom of the range also moves more slowly than
  the top, which is where the choosing actually happens.
• 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.