Default Folder X doesn’t play well with El Capitan’s System Integrity Protection

St. Clair Software’s Default Folder X — one of my favorite Mac utilities — won’t work with OS X El Capitan’s System Integrity Protection feature enabled. To allow Default Folder X to run, you can disable System Integrity Protection — or wait until Default Folder Version 5 is released (it’s coming “soon,” according to the folks at St. Clair Software).

System Integrity Protection (“SIP” for short) is a new feature in El Capitan that prevents anything from modifying the basic components of Mac OS X, even if it’s just done temporarily in memory. As St. Clair Software notes, this makes it very difficult for computer viruses or anything else to harmfully change or corrupt your system. The downside, however, is that it disables some capabilities that applications like Default Folder X use to give you more functionality.

If you want to run Default Folder X in El Capitan, you’ll have to disable SIP in the operating system with these steps:

• Restart your Mac.
• Hold down Command-R before OS X starts up and keep it held down until you see an Apple icon and a progress bar. Release. This boots you into Recovery.
• From the Utilities menu, select Terminal.

• At the prompt type exactly the following and then press Return:

csrutil disable

• Terminal should display a message that SIP was disabled.
• From the  menu, select Restart.

You can re-enable SIP by following the above steps, but using

csrutil enable

instead. 

Personally, as much as I like using Default Folder X, I’d wait for version 5 rather than disabling SIP.