The Conflict Catcher Window

Conflict Catcher’s most important information appears in the three white areas of the main screen.

The File List

The upper right quadrant of the main window is the heart of Conflict Catcher. It shows a list of every extension and control panel on your Macintosh, as well as many other kinds of files (depending upon how you’ve set up Conflict Catcher’s preferences). You can perform a wide variety of Macintosh housekeeping tasks within this list alone. For example:

Click a file’s name to turn it on or off.

Unless you’ve been fooling around with Conflict Catcher’s preference settings, highlighted files are turned on, and unhighlighted files are turned off. (Only when you restart the Macintosh does your new selection of control panels and extensions kick in.)

Behind the scenes, Conflict Catcher carries out your request to turn a certain file on or off by moving icons around — from the Extensions folder into the Extensions (Disabled) folder, for example.

Lock files on or off.

Some files, such as the Appearance extension of Mac OS 8 and 8.1, are so important that the Macintosh can’t even start up without them. They show up in the Conflict Catcher file list with a tiny padlock icon to the right of their names — these files have been locked on or off, so that they can’t accidentally be switched off or on.

You can unlock such files if you really want to, and you can also lock files of your own choosing on or off. To do so, Shift-click a file’s name. If it was locked, it’s now unlocked, and vice versa. 

Click the “flippy triangle” to collapse the list of files.

You can collapse the list — make it shorter — by clicking the tiny blue triangles that appear in the list of files. 

Tip: If you Option-click a flippy triangle, you expand or collapse all of the folders listed in the file list. 

 “Type select” to highlight a specific file and view its description.

You can also “type select,” just as you can in the Macintosh Finder — that is, you can type the first couple of letters of a file’s name to jump directly to it, so that you don’t have to scroll or use the mouse at all. Not only does type-selecting highlight the file, but it also opens the inspection panel for that file — that is, a description of the file appears in the white panel at the left of the Conflict Catcher main window. 

Choose from the “Listed by…” pop-up menu to control how your files are sorted.

By making selections from the pop-up menus above each column of information in the file list, you can change the way these columns are sorted. You may want to have the largest files listed first, or the ones that take the longest to load, or (especially when troubleshooting) the ones you’ve installed most recently. 

By clicking the tiny + or – buttons to the right of these column labels, you can make Conflict Catcher show more or fewer columns, each with its own pop-up menu of information to display. You can have up to nine columns on the screen at once; to make room for them, you can drag the dividing line between the column titles to make the columns narrower.  Conflict Catcher abbreviates the column information to keep it readable.

Click in the strip beside a file’s name to view its description.

When you click in the thin, white column to the left of a file’s name, a magnifying-glass symbol appears where you clicked, and the inspection panel at the left side of the screen reveals a host of information about the file whose name you clicked.

Tip: If you stumble upon a file whose description you think could be improved, click in the description area to open up an editing box, where you can type additions to any file’s description. 

The Group Links Panel

The lower right section of the main window is labeled Group Links. It lists any group links  — collections of extensions or control panels that, together, make a single feature (such as Internet access or CD-ROM) possible, saving you the trouble of turning on or off each file individually. See the help topic called “Links: Clusters of related files” for details; meanwhile, note that you can:

•   Click the name of a group link to turn all of the related files on or off.

•   Click to the left of the group link’s name to fill the inspection panel with information about the files that belong to that group.

•   Edit a group link by Control-clicking its name. A contextual, pop-up menu appears at your cursor tip; choose Modify to open the Edit Group Links dialog box, described in the next chapter.

•   Control how much space is dedicated to the group link list relative to the individual file list above it — just drag the divider bar up or down.