I loved using labels in ‘Classic’ Mac OS to colour-code files and folders in Finder. We lost this in the modern era, replaced by tags. In earlier versions of Mac OS X, they nearly filled the gap, because the whole name was coloured, but the dots of today’s Mac OS don’t quite fill the gap for me. I much prefer a strong visual indicator.

Fortunately we can still arbitrarily replace icons using the paste-over-icon trick in Finder’s Get Info window. Neil Sardesai’s Manilla is a Finder extension that automates that process, making it as easy as it ever was in the old days. It only works for folders, though, because it’s not compositing the icon with the hue. However, because I find the most utility in colour-coding folders, that’s enough for me.

Download Manila on GitHub

This update introduces an expansion of FastScripts’s own built-in scripting additions, with three powerful new commands for searching, replacing, and splitting text with regular expressions.

What a fantastic addition to a tool I use every day.

I still spend more time than you might imagine writing AppleScript. For dealing with text manipulation, I’ve both called out to Perl or done the ‘native’ text delimiters dance and neither does the job optimally.

Though I can’t rely on this for scripts I write for others necessarily, for anything that’s just for me, I look forward to using these the next time I have the itch.