Trickster — Recently Changed Files at a Keystroke
Why This Matters
The Finder's "Recent" view exists, sort of, but it's slow, lives behind a sidebar click, and conflates "files you used in apps" with "files that changed on disk." If you work across a tree like
lossless-monorepo/ — where 27 child repos and a half-dozen content directories are all churning — the question that actually matters is "what changed in the last hour, across everywhere?" and Finder is bad at answering it.Trickster is a small menubar app that has been quietly doing exactly this for years. It surfaces recently modified files across the filesystem, accessible via a keyboard shortcut, with filtering by app, by location, by file type. Version 3.9.11 just hit Homebrew cask. macOS 12+.What It Actually Does
- Recent-files popover triggered by a global hotkey. Files appear sorted by modification time across all locations you care about (configurable scopes).
- Filter by source app. "Show me what Figma touched today" vs. "what
makeproduced in the last 10 minutes." - Filter by file type / location. Per-folder watchlists; per-extension filters.
- Pin frequently used items. Stable shortcuts at the top of the popover.
- Hide noise. Exclude paths, exclude file types, exclude apps that spew temp files.
- Drag-out support. Drag from the popover directly into email, Slack, an upload field.
Where It Fits in Our Workflow
Two natural uses across the Lossless tree:
- "What did I just change" recovery. Working across
ai-labs/,content/,astro-knots/sites/*simultaneously, it's not uncommon to lose track of where a small edit landed. Trickster's chronological view across configured roots is a faster answer thanfind . -mmin -60plus mental filtering. - Pre-commit triage. Before a git conventions-style commit, Trickster's "all recently modified files in this tree" view is a useful sanity check against
git status— particularly for catching untracked files in submodules thatgit statusshows ambiguously.
Caveats: this is mature, niche software (3.x for years, modest install base) — the upside of which is "stable, predictable, no surprises"; the downside is the UI is unmistakably from an earlier era of macOS design. The functionality, however, is exactly the functionality. It is not trying to be a launcher (see tuna application launcher this cycle for that). It is trying to be a chronological file index, and it is.
Compare against
fzf over find -mmin (free, terminal-only) and Raycast's "Quicklinks / Recent Files" extension (subscription, GUI-launcher-centric). Trickster is the focused-tool answer.Install
bash
brew install --cask tricksterFree trial in-app, paid thereafter.