I went through the process on ForkLift's site to set ForkLift as the default file manager(using the SetApp version), and it's now set as default. To verify, I right clicked a folder within ForkLift and selected Reveal In Finder, and it opened in ForkLift.

I then added a folder to TinyStart but when using TinyStart the folder still opens in Finder, not ForkLift.

Have you tested this by chance and just wondering if I'm doing something wrong somewhere.

I've tried adding different folders and still get the same result.

At first while watching your video I was like "okay, that looks well made but I also need a symbol picker and sometimes like to do math / conversions quickly" -- imagine my gleeful smile when you listed those towards the end just like it's the easiest thing in the world to add those in!

I was an Alfred "user" for the longest time, but I never really used any advanced features, it just worked better than Spotlight.
With macOS 26 I gave Spotlight a try. It was not great, but just okay enough that I didn't bother re-installing Alfred.
Now this looks like it does everything I need: Quick, no unnecessary animations, looks nice and only has features that I'll actually use.

Bought it, installed it, gonna use it the next little while and see whether it works well for me in praxis

I'm purchasing this app as soon as I get home, so thank you for this!