Chad Maltby, September 2026
Let me tell you why.
When you save something the Mac dumps you into a folder somewhere. You may or may not move away from that. Then you save. Later, both Finder and Spotlight require you to know something. Where the file is, what it is called, or some content to surface it for you. It requires some knowledge on your part. If I am saving many files every day, it is a thin knowledge. If I worked all day yesterday on ten different files, how am I supposed to remember what I saved on Thursday?
I use Finder in gallery view, or list view with space bar, and scroll. Without a better option. This process is completely nuts. So I have to select a place in the hierarchy of folders and search in it.
I help lots of friends and family with IT stuff. You’d be surprised how many people don’t get the difference between the Desktop and Documents or Downloads. I’ve seen Desktops with thousands of files on them. I’ve seen Downloads folders that have never been emptied out, and so many people who never move anything out of them.
Computer folders are still organized in structures set up some 50 years ago. Operating systems change. Computers change. Search changes. But this has never changed. I can't change that.
In one instance, a friend asked me to help him locate something on his Desktop. I discovered that his Desktop contained more than 1,000 files. One year later a person knows almost nothing about a file, but they still have to find it. So I built a custom app for him: a drawer that eliminates folder hierarchy and location knowledge, and shows everything visually. It allowed him to scroll through everything quickly and find it.
That app has grown over the last year to something I've used with 20+ people. I found more and more people with the same frustration, so I decided to turn it into something useful for them and useful for me. This is Kepter.
I would be considered a power user, have a good knowledge of the mac's whole structure. But when I started using Kepter, and started bringing all the features of Finder into it, I realized how much less my brain was thinking about any context of a file. It's saved me time and then some. It releases that capacity in my brain for something more important.