mysides

A command-line tool for managing the macOS Finder sidebar favorites — updated for modern macOS.

This is a Swift rewrite of the original mosen/mysides by Eamon Brosnan. The original used the LSSharedFileList API, which was deprecated in macOS 10.10 and removed in macOS 12. This rewrite reads and writes the .sfl4 sidebar file directly using NSKeyedArchiver, without any deprecated API.

Requirements

• macOS 13 or later
• Apple Silicon or Intel

Installation

Homebrew (recommended)

brew install 7onnie/tap/mysides

Build from source

Requires Swift 5.9+ (included with Xcode Command Line Tools).

git clone https://github.com/7onnie/mysides.git
cd mysides
swift build -c release
cp .build/release/mysides /usr/local/bin/

Usage

# List all sidebar favorites
mysides list

# Add a folder (name can differ from the folder name)
mysides add Projects file:///Users/you/Projects

# Remove a sidebar item by name
mysides remove Projects

# Show version
mysides version

Example output

Applications  -> file:///Applications/
Downloads     -> file:///Users/you/Downloads/
Projects      -> file:///Users/you/Projects/
Desktop       -> file:///Users/you/Desktop/
Documents     -> file:///Users/you/Documents/

How it works

The Finder sidebar favorites are stored in:

~/Library/Application Support/com.apple.sharedfilelist/
  com.apple.LSSharedFileList.FavoriteItems.sfl4

This is a binary NSKeyedArchiver file. Each entry contains Apple Bookmark data (the modern replacement for aliases) plus a UUID and visibility flag. mysides decodes this file, applies the requested change, re-encodes it atomically, and sends a distributed notification so Finder reloads without restarting.

Supported formats

Format	macOS version
.sfl4	macOS 15+
.sfl3	macOS 13–14
.sfl2	macOS 10.11–12

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

Original work © 2016 Eamon Brosnan · Rewrite © 2026 Jonas Haderer