Mac: Just because we love symbolic links on Windows so much – thanks, Steam Mover – we’re going to show you a handy macOS app that lets you set up symbolic links on Apple’s operating system as well.
Photo: Pixabay
The app is called SymbolicLinker, an appropriately named open-source utility for macOS. Though it’s a little tricky to install – in the sense that you should probably read the accompanying “installation instructions.rtfd” guide when you load the DMG file – it’s incredibly easy to use once you’ve set it up as a service in macOS.
Here’s why symbolic links, and this app, are great: Suppose you’re running out of space on your Mac machine. Instead of going through the somewhat-easy, but still-arduous process of uninstalling beefy apps or games and reinstalling them elsewhere, you can move the folder that’s eating up too much space to a different hard drive – internal or external.
You then create a symbolic link based on the folder’s new location, rename the link to whatever the folder was called, and drag the link to wherever the folder was located.
This symbolic link tells macOS, “Hey, let’s pretend these files are right where they were, even though we’ve technically moved them somewhere else.” It’s like a little bridge that connects the old location to the new, and your system won’t care about the difference.
That might look like an alias, but it’s actually a symbolic link. Screenshot: David Murphy
With SymbolicLinker, creating new symbolic links is as easy as right-clicking on a folder and selecting “Make Symbolic Link”.
When I tested it out with some Steam games, the service successfully loaded games I had moved to the desktop – not where Steam normally keeps them – all thanks to symbolic links that I had dropped in their original installation locations. The entire process took a minute or so and couldn’t have been any easier.
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