Forel

Rules that watch a folder and move, rename, tag or label whatever lands in it, entirely on the machine.

What it does

Forel is a menu bar app that watches folders. A rule matches on name, extension, kind, size, date, Finder tag or colour label, and acts by moving, renaming, tagging or labelling — which in practice means Downloads sorting itself instead of growing to four thousand items.

Everything is evaluated on device. There is no account and no telemetry, which is the distinction worth having when the folders being watched are client work.

For the opposite problem — creating a folder structure rather than tidying one — see Prefab.

Notes

The cask lives in the project’s own tap rather than homebrew-cask, so the install line carries the tap name. brew upgrade handles it normally afterwards.

Alternative to

Alternative	Type	Trade-off
Hazel	Paid	The incumbent, with more conditions and AppleScript actions
Keyboard Maestro	Paid	Folder triggers inside a general-purpose macro tool
Folder Actions in Automator	Built in	Already installed, and unchanged for a decade
`fswatch` with a shell script	Open source	Total control, and you maintain it
Prefab	Free	Builds structures instead of sorting into them