I’m re-looking at FileZilla and despite its clunky appearance it doesn’t seem to have any of the problems I ran into with Forklift or Transmit so far. Hmm… It’s not really that bad. 
Sad update on what happened to YummyFTP: The developer, a really nice and helpful guy, has passed away according to their twitter feed.
The Forklift support team are very helpful. They have confirmed the bug I am seeing and working on it. To clarify, this is the problem with batch uploaded files ending up with some of the files at the remote server having zero bytes. This doesn’t happen with either FileZilla or Transmit. Apparently it is some compatibility with my particular FTP server (which I use at dozens of sites), still it works with other FTP clients and they are being nice about looking at it.
Huh? My Transmit does.
Great app…love it, use about 20% of its features almost every day.
Rob
My Transmit test doesn’t refresh the remote pane for existing files which have been overwritten. I asked Panic support about that and they are the folks who told me it doesn’t and that I need to manually refresh.
New files added do show up though in the listing automatically.
Doug
I have been very happy with ViperFTP. The localisation is a bit odd. But the app works fine.
Transmit is overhyped and overpriced.
While waiting for the Forklift people to come back with a fix for the problem I’m having, I’ve been playing more with FileZilla, which I tended to ignore because it always struck me as so clunky.
But you know, for FTP it’s not bad!
If you have everything set right in the preferences, it works very well on a Mac. It’s dual pane, you can see the files transfer, you can see the remote pane update when the files are finished, you can monitor the transfer queue in the bottom pane, you can set it to do things like double-click to edit a local file instead of transfer, you can set overwrite defaults.
It’s not as “pretty” as a Mac app. And you can’t customize the toolbar it seems. But functionally, for FTP, it seems to work as well as YummyFTP did.
Also support is better than for any of the paid apps I’ve tried so far because they have an active support forum and somebody always seems to reply with useful information very quickly.
There haven’t been any updates re: Interarchy 11 Beta in months. But I’m avoiding Catalina except on a testing machine because it breaks too many important tools. This may be the OS where Apple and I part ways.
As far as speed goes, in multiple tests of uploading the same 15 files of varying sizes to the same server, it took various FTP clients this amount of times:
- FileZilla, 19 seconds
- ForkLift, 39 seconds
- Transmit, 45 seconds
Beward of picking the “wrong” metrics when selecting a software application!
Yes, FileZilla provides the quickest transfer time by far, but what about the time that’s needed to configure and use it?
Especially if you use an(y) application for a long stretches at a time, it’s likely more important how efficient and effective its user interface is, than how long it takes to complete a behind-the-scenes process like a file upload.
In this particular case, just looking at the screenshots of FileZilla makes me cringe — not because of its clearly outdates aesthetics, but because of (very obvious) interaction design flaws.
As they say, you’re mileage may vary, but it might be worth waiting for a few (more) seconds for a process to complete, than to have to endure a below-par user experience.
Yet all in all, my conclusion for FTP client for Catalina for now is FileZilla.
Cyberduck isn’t dual pane and I deal with a few dozen servers. Each server has their own local and remote directories. Doing that with drag from Finder windows would be an enormous nuisance. That’s why dual pane is needed for my work anyway.
Transmit has bugs which I have reported to Panic. In particular, at least with my servers, if I try to transfer a file of a few MB then at the end the remote server ends up with 0 bytes in the file, after repeated tests. So Transmit is off the table for me now. Could it be an issue with my FTP server being sort of old? Maybe. But there are other FTP clients which don’t experience the same problem.
Forklift also seems nice. But I ran into some issues with that as well, which the developer is looking at.
But the fastest and most reliable so far is FileZilla, even though it looks sort of clunky on the Mac, and you can’t customize some things like the toolbar, or the sound it makes when transfer is complete.
FileZilla is the fastest by far, and 100% reliable so far, and it is dual pane, and you can have tabs for different connections that are open at once, and you can see the transfers taking place in the transfer queue nicely. And they also have a very responsive support community where you can get answers about settings questions very quickly. I might ask a question about FZ there and get a response in an hour. If I ask Panic Support a support question in their recommended Twitter support it could be days before I get response.
So for me, for now at least, I’m using FileZilla.
Excellent! Thanx! (Just getting to this now.) ―Ken
I’ve been avoiding installing Catalina for months, but buying a new iMac forced the issue, and I’ve discovered (like the original poster did months earlier) that Yummy FTP is no more. I’ve now downloaded Transmit, Fetch, Forklift, and FileZilla, and none of them do this one little thing that I used just about every time I used Yummy FTP: I could right-click on a file in the remote directory and get an http URL for the file, using the domain name rather than an ftp URL using the webhost directory information. So instead of a URL like: ftp://ftp.somewebhost.com/docs/2018_singalong_songbook.pdf, I could get a URL like: http://abqfolkfest.org/docs/2018_singalong_songbook.pdf (yes, it’s a real URL…if you want a bunch of folksong lyrics, go for it…)
So, other than kvetching, I guess I’m wondering if I overlooked something in one of these apps and there’s a way to get the URL that I want, or if there are other ftp programs I could try, or if there’s some automated way of manipulating the clipboard contents to get a modified URL.
Thanks for any help,
Kris
Original poster here!
I ended up really liking CyberDuck. I love the way you can drag and drop from any folder, and it’s easy to edit files offline and online.
I have no need for the feature you’re looking for, but I just tested and, voila, it has it. If you right-click on a remote file one of the options is for the URL. That option is a choice between either FTP or HTTP URL.
Thanks! I just downloaded CyberDuck. After I found the right place to put in a domain name, the HTTP URL did what I wanted. Now I just have to get used to the single pane. But since I only deal with a couple of websites, it shouldn’t be too hard.
Kris
How does the FTP client know the base directory used for the web domain’s virtual server? Or is it assumed that ftp uses the same?
At first I was not enthusiastic about single pane either. Now I am. The drag and drop is so easy.
Cyberduck:
“Web URL
Quickly copy or open the corresponding HTTP URLs of a selected file in your web browser. Includes CDN and pre-signed URLs for S3.”
Just FYI, and in case other readers might be wondering about this:
Transmit does support the feature you’re looking for, but it only works if you enter the site’s server root folder. Otherwise, Transmit cannot determine how to map a document’s server-side folder to its public URL:
Once you’ve configured a server/connection this way, selecting Copy URL from the context menu for a file will copy that file’s http(s) URL to the clipboard.
2 Likes