MouseBoost Pro 5.2.8 — Mac version

You’re staring at a folder you need to zip, rename, and open in VSCode — all before lunch. Instead of three separate trips to the menu bar, you right-click once and tick off the lot. That’s the job MouseBoost Pro does.

Spawn files from a right-click template

Right-click anywhere on the desktop or in a Finder window and pick a template. MouseBoost Pro lets you instantly spawn plain text, rich text, Word docs, spreadsheets and more, without opening a parent app first.

Can I change a folder’s icon without digging into Get Info?

Yes. The right-click menu now has a dedicated option to paste an image straight onto a folder. It turns a fiddly copy-and-paste job into a two-second click.

Cut, copy and grab file paths with visual feedback

Cut, copy and paste files using familiar shortcuts, with clear visual feedback in Finder. You also get a “Copy Path” action, which is a small thing that saves a surprising amount of typing when you’re hopping between folders and Terminal.

Launch project folders straight into your editor

Right-click a project folder and you can launch it directly in VSCode, Sublime Text or Emacs. It’s perfect when you live in Finder and don’t want to pull up an Open dialog every time you switch tasks.

A lot of the 5.2.x updates are the sort you don’t notice until you need them. Quick preview for folder trees, for instance — right-click a directory that’s grown into a mess of nested subfolders and you can see the whole structure before you dive in. No opening, no backtracking. The aspect ratio selection and automatic OCR copy came in handy the first time I had to grab text from a screenshot someone dropped in a shared drive. I right-clicked, copied the text, and pasted it into a note without ever launching a separate OCR tool.

Batch renaming got properly useful too. You can now insert text at a specific position — say, slotting a date stamp in the middle of a filename without wrecking the prefix. And there’s a rename-from-list option. Feed it a plain text list of names, and it’ll apply them in order. I used that last week when a folder of scanned receipts needed matching filenames to an invoice spreadsheet. The maximum depth setting for file trees keeps things tidy when you only want the top two levels, not the whole labyrinth.

A designer’s afternoon with MouseBoost Pro

Imagine a packaging designer juggling twenty folder icons, a zip of assets for the printer, and a last-minute batch rename because the client changed the product codes. She right-clicks a folder, swaps its icon to the new artwork in one go. Another right-click compresses the print-ready folder with encryption — the printer needs a password, and Finder’s built-in zip doesn’t offer that. She copies the file path, pastes it into an email, and moves on. Then she highlights the whole mess of misnamed mockups, right-clicks, and feeds in a clean list from the client’s spreadsheet. Ten minutes, no extra apps opened.

Finder stays snappy even on older Macs

Does it slow Finder down? Not in any way I’ve felt. The extension hooks into the right-click menu and stays quiet until you use it. On older Macs running El Capitan, it’s still snappy — the developer kept the minimum at 10.11 for a reason.

Can I hide some of the thirty-odd tools? Yes. The menu customisation is the first thing worth doing after install. Drag the actions you actually use to the top and switch off the rest. It stops the right-click menu feeling bloated. The sorting sticks across restarts.

What if I use iTerm2 instead of Terminal? MouseBoost Pro can open iTerm2 and land you straight in the current folder. If you spend half your day in a shell, that alone might be why you keep mouseboost pro around. It also works with the standard Terminal app — just pick your poison in preferences.

Is the encrypted zip any good? It’s a straightforward password-protected zip. Useful when you’re sending something sensitive and don’t want to mess with a separate archiver. The MD5, SHA1 and SHA256 checksums help the person on the other end verify nothing got scrambled.

One tip: if you’re on a machine where Gatekeeper kicks up a fuss, mount the disk image and run the “Open Gatekeeper friendly” file. Tap Enter in Terminal when prompted, drag the app into Applications, and launch. After that, mouseboost pro sits in the background and waits for your next right-click.

• Quick preview for folder trees now works without expanding every branch
• Aspect ratio selection and automatic OCR copy added for screenshots
• Scrolling capture’s been tidied up so it catches fewer glitches
• Batch renaming can now insert text at a set position and pull new names from a list
• New maximum depth setting stops file and directory trees getting out of hand
• A handful of known bugs squashed

• OS X 10.11 (El Capitan) or newer
• Apple Silicon or Intel 64-bit Mac