The Yummy FTP Preferences settings can be accessed by selecting the Preferences option in the Yummy FTP menu.
This will display a window which is divided into several tabs, each of which contain many optional settings to govern the overall behaviour and appearance of Yummy FTP.
This tab has options to control how the user interface looks and behaves. The following options are available:
Enables or disables the display of a light blue and white horizontally striped background to the FTP Browser and Bookmark Viewer listings.
This option is only operational when using Mac OS X 10.4 or later
Enables or disables the display of a thin vertical line at the start and end of each column of text in the FTP Browser and Bookmark Viewer listings.
This option is only operational when using Mac OS X 10.4 or later
Enables or disables the metallic textured appearance of the FTP Browser and Bookmark Viewer windows. When the option is disabled, these windows will take on the Aqua blue and white appearance.
Enables or disables the original method of selecting several files/folders at once when dragging with the mouse, which uses a transparent rectangular selection to enclose the required items. When this option is disabled, file/folder selection works the same was as in the Finder.
Enables or disables the smaller variation of scroll bars in the FTP Browser and Bookmarks View listing display. When the option is disabled, scroll bars will have the standard size, but there is less viewable area of the file listings.
The number chosen from the popup menu will set the font size display for FTP Browser and Bookmarks Viewer listings.
Enables or disables the rippling and barber pole effect in transfer and connection progress displays.
Since this animation effect can consume a considerable amount of CPU time, disabling it can produce a reduction in overall CPU usage.
Enables or disables the zooming effect when a connection is established with a server and the FTP Browser window is then shown. It also controls the fading effect when FTP Browser windows are closed. On slower Macs, disabling these effects can increase the application responsiveness.
Enables or disables date display which relates to the current day. For example, with the option enabled, a file that is one day old will show a date of “Yesterday”, whereas with the option disabled the full date will be shown.
Enables or disables the ability for each FTP Browser window to maintain independent window positions and sizes, toolbar settings, and all aspects of the FTP Browser window that can be customized. With this option enabled, all FTP Browser windows share a common last-remembered-window position and size, toolbar config, etc.
Enables or disables the display of these FTP Browser listing columns to be represented as a human-readable format, or their actual octal and decimal values.
Enables or disables the display of file sizes in FTP Browser listings to either be summarised (for example, 10K) or listed in full (for example, 10240)
Enables or disables the display of a Trash icon in the bottom right of the FTP Browser window. When displayed, items can be dragged onto the Trash icon to delete them.
Enables or disables the small or large format of the status display in the bottom left of the FTP Browser window. The format also depends on whether the Trash icon is displayed or not - when displayed, the status area contains more lines of text.
Enables or disables the small or large font size for the FTP Transcript view within the FTP Browser window.
On some systems, the default anti-aliasing threshold results in an almost unreadable display when the small font size is chosen. In these cases the larger font size setting should be chosen.
The selection made from the popup menu determines what will happen when a file is double-clicked. The options available are: Nothing, Transfer and Edit.
The popup menu lists all the columns that can be displayed in an FTP Browser window listing. For each one that has a bullet point next to it in the menu, that column will be shown.
Enables or disables the display of files and folders which are not normally displayed in the Finder, such as .DS_Store files.
Enables or disables the ability to remember folder listings in a lookup table in memory. This speeds up browsing when enabled because the disk is only accessed when the contents of a folder have actually changed. When disabled, the disk is always accessed when listing folder contents.
This setting defines the Mac folder listing which is shown by default when you open a connection to a server, and doubles up as the default location of downloaded files. To change the setting, click the Select button and navigate to the required folder. The full path to the selected folder is displayed.
Enables or disables the display of files and folders which are not normally displayed by the server, such as .htaccess files, or other items with names that start with a full point.
This special option may be required for some servers to force them to return information about invisible items.
Enables or disables the ability to remember directory listings in a lookup table in memory. This speeds up browsing when enabled because the server is only queried when the contents of a directory have actually changed. When disabled, the server is always queried when listing directory contents.
Enable or disable the display of icons in the server listing which indicate the permissions which are associated with the entries listed. For example, a file which cannot be modified would be displayed with padlock icon overlaid on its original icon.
When this option is enabled, the queue drawer will be automatically shown if there are queued items to be transferred, and will automatically close again when the queue is empty. When the option is disabled the queue drawer will only be shown or hidden on demand.
When this option is enabled, the Bookmarks Viewer window will be displayed when Yummy FTP is launched, otherwise it will not.
Enables or disables the warning alert that is displayed prior to items being actually deleted. With the option disabled items will be deleted with out warning.
Enables or disables the display of the New Connection window at appropriate times. For example, when Yummy FTP is launched, when a connection is closed which is not associated with a Bookmark, or when Yummy FTP‘s dock icon is clicked to bring it to the foreground and there are no windows currently displayed.
Enables or disables the question that is asked about saving as a Bookmark when an FTP Browser window is closed which does not have a Bookmark associated with it.
Enables or disables the Yummy FTP splash screen which is shown when Yummy FTP is launched. This option can only be disabled by registered users.
If this option is enabled, a warning alert is displayed prior to closing an FTP Browser window which has queued or active tasks outstanding. If the option is disabled, the FTP Browser window will be closed regardless.
This tab has options to control how Yummy FTP behaves when performing transfers. The following options are available:
These options control what happens when downloading an item and an item of the same name already exists in the download folder.
Yummy FTP will display an alert which gives options to Replace the item, Skip it, Resume the transfer (in the case of a partially downloaded file being in the download folder) or Cancel the transfer.
The item will not be transferred.
The item that already exists in the download folder will be automatically overwritten by the contents of the item to be downloaded.
If the item that already exists in the download folder is a partially downloaded copy of the item to be downloaded, Yummy FTP will attempt to resume the transfer from where it left off. Sometimes this is not always possible, for example if the server does not support resume downloads, and in that case the transfer will be started from the beginning again.
These options control what happens when uploading an item and an item of the same name already exists in the upload directory.
Yummy FTP will display an alert which gives options to Replace the item, Skip it, Resume the transfer (in the case of a partially uploaded file being in the upload directory) or Cancel the transfer.
The item will not be transferred.
The item that already exists in the upload directory will be automatically overwritten by the contents of the item to be uploaded.
If the item that already exists in the upload directory is a partially uploaded copy of the item to be uploaded, Yummy FTP will attempt to resume the transfer from where it left off. Sometimes this is not always possible, for example if the server does not support resume uploads, and in that case the transfer will be started from the beginning again.
This checkbox governs whether the sounds chosen in the popup menus below it are played when transfers complete, either successfully, or not.
Yummy FTP will play the selected sounds in the popup menus for an upload success and failure respectively. If None is selected but the transfer completion sounds checkbox is enabled, your system sound will be played.
Yummy FTP will play the selected sounds in the popup menus for a download success and failure respectively. If None is selected but the transfer completion sounds checkbox is enabled, your system sound will be played.
This checkbox governs whether Yummy FTP uses several simultaneous connections to the server when performing transfers. This is highly recommended in order to speed up transfers. If the option is disabled, only one FTP transaction can be executed at a time (ie transferring, browsing, renaming, etc) and transfers will be slower.
The entered number governs how many simultaneous connections can be opened with the server. The default setting is 5.
When this option is enabled and several items are initiated for transfer, Yummy FTP will use the number of connections specified in the setting above and spread the items to be transferred over that number of connections, greatly increasing the speed of transfer. With this option disabled, all the items will be transferred as one group on a single connection.
When this option is enabled connections which are opened in addition to the main browsing connection will have all their actions logged to the FTP transcript. By default this option is off and only the main browsing connection will be logged.
This are contains many other options relating to how files are transferred.
This option operates independently of the one which governs whether invisible items are displayed in the browser listings. When it is enabled, invisible items on both your Mac and server will be included in transfers. If disabled, those items will be automatically omitted.
This option works in conjunction with the one above. If enabled, it allows the .DS_Store files that the Finder creates to be treated as a special case and either included or excluded from transfers when other invisible items are transferred.
This option works slightly differently for SFTP and FTP, but its purpose is to set the date of downloaded items to be the same as those on the server, and to set the date of uploaded items to be the same as those on your Mac. With FTP, only the download option can be reliably set and Yummy FTP will not attempt to set the server files dates.
This option is only available for SFTP connections. When files are transferred, their access rights (read/write/execute) are kept intact.
This option governs the way in which text files are stored on your Mac. In the Mac OS 9 days, text files usually had an invisible CR character to denote line endings. In UNIX (and therefore Mac OS X) these line endings are denoted by the invisible LF character. This option lets you choose which format you prefer for text files on your Mac.
This option governs the way in which text files are send to the server when using SFTP. There are three options: Unix, Mac and DOS, which have line endings of LF, CR and CRLF respectively.
This tab has options to control how Yummy FTP behaves when problems are encountered, such as dropped or busy connections, or actual errors reported by the server. The following options are available:
This checkbox controls when Yummy FTP will automatically recover from dropped or busy connections. If this option is disabled, Yummy FTP will never attempt to reconnect. This is not recommended.
This slider adjusts the amount of time after which Yummy FTP will decide a connection is lost, if there is no activity during that time. When this condition is met, Yummy FTP will close the connection, then reconnect to the server.
This slider works in conjunction with the Reconnect time above, and adjusts the amount of time after which Yummy FTP will reconnect to the server after deciding that the connection was lost.
This slider also works in conjunction with the Reconnect time above, and instructs Yummy FTP to either attempt to resume the interrupted transfer from where it left off, or start the transfer from the start again. If it is not possible to resume the transfer it will be started from the beginning anyway.
This slider adjusts the retry interval between connection attempts to busy servers.
This area deals with actual errors that are encountered. The options available allow for an automatic error retry mechanism, which can be especially useful for misbehaving servers and/or unattended operations.
Four options are available:
This slider adjusts the amount of time after which Yummy FTP will take the action that has been selected above.
This slider adjusts the number of times that Yummy FTP will perform the selected action after an error occurs. Dragging the slider all the way to the right will select Unlimited retries.
This tab has options that are server or connection-centric. The following options are available:
When this checkbox is enabled, connection attempts to servers will be made via the proxy server as specified in the boxes detailed below. FTP proxy is often used to traverse firewalls, identifying the user before allowing the connection to the server through.
Unless you are certain about the configuration, ask your network administrator to supply you with the required settings.
The name or IP address of the proxy server should be entered here.
The TCP/IP port number that the proxy server listens for connections on should be entered here. For SOCKS servers the standard port number is 1080. Most other proxy servers use port 21.
If the proxy server requires authentication, enter your proxy user name here.
If the proxy server requires authentication, enter your proxy password here.
This popup menu has several choices which reflect the behaviour of several different types of proxy servers. If you are not certain which type the proxy server is, try each setting in turn until you have a successful connection.
This checkbox instructs Yummy FTP to set the access permissions of files you upload to the server. The permissions that have been configured in the provided checkboxes will be applied.
This area lets you enter the permissions in octal format
The three rows of this groups of checkboxes allows you to set the access permissions of the Owner, Group and Others respectively.
This area allows you to set which editor application is used for editing files on the server by default, and also when edited files are sent back to the server.
The popup menu lists some well known editors that Yummy FTP supports directly. Select the editor named in order to set it as the default editor. If your favourite editor is not listed, select the Other... option and then locate the editor application on your Mac.
This option controls when changed files are sent back to the server. These are only available for ODB aware applications, such as TextWrangler, TextMate and others. Four options are available:
This are contains many smaller options that affect connections to the server in different ways. The following options are available:
This menu shows all the text encodings that are available in your OS. It is used in Yummy FTP to display the names of items on the server with the correct font and appearance. The standard setting of Unicode (UTF-8) will be sufficient for the majority of servers.
This checkbox works in conjunction with the encoding selection. If the encoding is ISO based, enabling this checkbox will automatically translate from Mac encoding to ISO encoding for uploaded text files, and translate from ISO encoding to Mac encoding for downloaded text files.
This checkbox enables a feature in Yummy FTP which will automatically reverse the FTP connection mode should it fail on one or the other setting. This can be especially useful because some servers only support one or the other method of connecting, and also for getting connected across a firewall which might prevent one or the other method from working even though the server supports it.
When enabled, the Passive method of connecting to servers is used initially. If this fails then the Active method will be attempted. When disabled, the opposite order will be tried.
In some servers the date of items can appear to be ahead of time. Normally this is due to time offset differences and this can be catered for properly, but some servers simply misbehave. This option is present to cater for the latter, and if an item with a date in the future is encountered, Yummy FTP will assume it is dated from last year.
When using public key authentication, the full path to your key file needs to be passed to the ssh subsystem in order to make the connection. In some ssh installations the path needs to be quoted, such as “/path/to/keyfile” and others do not. If your keyfile connection attempt fails then you should try this option.
When this option is enabled, Yummy FTP will save any passwords you enter into your Keychain and recover them later if you need to connect again. This also means that no passwords will be saved in your Bookmarks, which is more secure.
With this option enabled, Yummy FTP will examine the file listing data sent by the server when browsing to see if any of the listed items are symlinks (alias files). For each one that is found, Yummy FTP will ask the server if it represents a file or a folder so that the item can be displayed accurately in the FTP Browser listing. If this option is not enabled, these items will be displayed with a question mark in the FTP Browser window and Yummy FTP will attempt to resolve them as and when they are used. If your directory listings take a long time to appear, it might be that there are many such items in the server directories and the resolution of them is slowing down browsing. In this case, disabling the option might be preferred.
When this option is enabled, Yummy FTP will periodically send a “NOOP” message to the server to indicate that it is still connected. This also has the effect of resetting timeout values in any router or firewall that you might be behind, which would otherwise disconnect you for apparently being idle.