Organizing Downloads

Auto-sort by type

With Sort completed downloads into category folders enabled in Settings, MacGet files each finished download into a subfolder of your destination based on its type.

Anything MacGet can't categorise stays in the destination root rather than landing in a catch-all folder.

This is off by default, and sorting happens at finalize — while a download is in flight, its partial file sits in the destination root.

The category matches the icon shown next to the download in the list, so what you see in the queue is where the file will end up.

Filename collisions

If the destination already contains a file with the same name, MacGet appends a counter rather than overwriting: report.pdf becomes report (2).pdf, then report (3).pdf, and so on.

This resolution happens at finalize, not when the download starts, so a file that appears while the download is running is still handled correctly.

Filenames from the server

MacGet determines the filename in this order:

1. A Content-Disposition header, including RFC 5987 encoded forms (filename*=UTF-8''…) for non-ASCII names.
2. The last path component of the URL.
3. A fallback derived from the host.

Names are truncated safely at 255 bytes with NFC normalisation preserved, so a long name with accented or non-Latin characters doesn't produce an invalid file.

Partial files

While downloading, MacGet writes to a hidden partial file next to the destination:

<destination>/.<filename>.macget-partial

It is allocated at full size up front and written to at the correct offsets by each chunk. On APFS the file stays sparse, so it doesn't consume the full size until the bytes actually arrive.

The partial is moved into place only after the download completes and any checksum verifies. A failed download leaves the partial behind so it can be resumed — deleting it forces a fresh start.