The Irritation
I spend most of my day in the terminal. Paths are second nature to me. But every so often I have to leave the warm embrace of the command line and deal with Finder — and every time, I hit the same wall. I want to copy the absolute path of a file, or I want to move a file into the folder that's sitting right there. And Finder just... won't let me. Not conveniently, anyway.
Sure, there are hidden shortcuts. You can Command+Option+C to copy a path, if you remember that exact combo across a network share. There are third-party extensions. But all of them feel like bandaids on a wound that shouldn't exist.
The Should-Have-Been-Obvious Features
I want two things, and I refuse to believe I'm the only one:
- Absolute path display: Show me where I am. Don't make me guess the path to the file I'm looking at.
- Quick copy: Copy a file's path in one click, so I can paste it anywhere — a terminal, a setting, a docs snippet.
- Move-to-folder: Drag a file onto a folder and have it actually move there without a step-by-step dialog dance.
These are things every power user wants. They're the reasons apps like Path Finder exist and sell for $39.99. But I didn't want to pay for a file manager — I wanted Finder fixed. And since Apple wasn't going to do it, I built the context-menu command myself.
Building It in Swift
macOS gives you one genuinely great hook for this: the Finder Sync extension. It lets a small Swift app inject items into the Finder's context menu. From there it's a native Swift + AppKit app with a menu bar icon, a settings window, and the extension doing the real work.
Swift is the right tool here. AppKit gives you first-class access to all the things that matter — the pasteboard, the file manager, URL handling. And because it's a native Mac app, it starts instantly and uses almost no memory. No Electron runtime. No bundled browser. Just a small, fast, focused utility.
Every power-user feature Apple doesn't ship is a missing-party app built once, alone, and quietly.
The Result
Command-Move is a tiny app that lives in your menu bar. Click it (or use a keyboard shortcut) and you get a floating window showing the current absolute path of your frontmost Finder window. One button copies it to your clipboard. Drag a file onto the folder icon and it moves there instantly. Done.
It's not flashy. It doesn't have a 47-tab settings panel. It does exactly three things and does them well — the way macOS utilities used to be.