Apr 20, 2020  Third-party developers have taken the matter into their own hands and have been pushing out some great Finder replacement apps. So, if you really want your macOS Finder to do more, here are the top 10 Finder alternatives for Mac You can use in 2020. Best Finder Alternatives in 2020 1. Commander One v2.

Our you can just go to Library and drag the favorites folder into the sidebar.

There is also an Applescript called 'New Favorites Window' located here:
/Library/Scripts/Navigation Scripts/New Favorites Window.scpt

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What I'd like is to be able to see the Finder's 'Recent Folders' list in the sidebar. However, I couldn't find any way to access this as a folder...

How about using Default Folder to get the 'just used folders' feature?

Panther seems to have done away with the Favorites folder altogether, so this is why the key command no longer works.
If you look at the Go menu, Favorites is no longer in the list. I did an Archive and Install, and Panther did not make a new Favorites folder either. I guess Apple figures the Sidebar replaces the Favorites folder.

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Favorites still exists - do a search for the word in Help and the first result covers this. The folder is in your ~/Library folder. The help file does suggest that the Finder sidebar be used in place of Favorites, and the icons in the sidebar will scale as you add more items, which is nice, but if you have a lot of favorites you'll probably be happier adding the folder to the sidebar. Now, if you do this, the icon for the folder does change to the familiar Favorites heart. But! Dragging and dropping does not create aliases any more - it moves the dropped item into the folder wholesale. So you need to cmd-alt drag to create an alias, unless I'm missing something vital. I suppose you could add a folder action to Favorites that moved the dropped file back to its original location and then created an alias in Favorites whenever you added a file...

It is also my impression that the sidebar replaces the favourites folder, which is a pity, since I liked to have access to a handfull of very often used folders via the finder bar icons, and having a separate longer list of favourites (mainly used in save dialog boxes).
My sidebar is now quite long, taking up a lot of space with all the long folder names I have, and also confuses me somewhat since in icon view it looks like the are some additional items in my folders. The finder bar icons were optically much more separated from the window content.
If I could only figure out how to restrict the sidebar to show only the icons; currently every time I open a folder the first thing I do is minimizing the sidebar so it only shows the icons.

If you did a clean install and want your Favorites folder back, simply create a new folder named 'Favorites' and drag it to your sidebar, or call it anything you want.
For hamarkus:
If you want to restrict the sidebar to only show icons, simply drag the places column bar to the left till you only see the icons. Note that this only applies to the current window. To make this apply to all new windows, create a new window and drag the places column bar to the left as mentioned above till you only get the icons. Then close the window. All new windows will inherit this view. For aliases you may have in your dock, click the alias to open the window, do the same steps as above for a new window, then close the window.

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Oh, and one other thing. You can still drag folders to the Finders toolbar as in Jaguar and earlier.