Commander

Commander at a glance

What it is

A desktop, dual-pane file manager with keyboard-first and mouse workflows.

Platforms

macOS, Windows and Linux.

License

Fully functional shareware. Registration costs $10 / year and removes the startup reminder.

Best for

Fast file operations, batch work, archives, remote storage, file inspection and disk cleanup.

Overview

Commander is a keyboard-driven file manager with two independent panes. It is built for the everyday rhythm of copying, moving, comparing and organizing files, but it also carries heavier tools: batch renaming, recursive search, directory synchronization, archive handling, file conversion, encryption, an integrated terminal, remote and cloud panels for SFTP, S3-compatible object storage, WebDAV, FTP/FTPS, Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive, encrypted Nearby Share transfers between your own computers, Windows Network Neighborhood browsing, gallery browsing and CleanMyMac-style disk cleanup. It runs on macOS, Windows and Linux.

The trial is not crippled. Commander is fully functional as shareware: every feature is available, and the unregistered edition only shows a short startup dialog before the app opens. Buying a license removes that dialog and supports continued development.

For a searchable guide to the product, see the Commander documentation.

Latest changes

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Two modes

On first launch Commander asks how you like to work, and you can switch at any time.

Normal

A clean, roomy layout for everyday file management — comfortable spacing, curated columns (name, size, date), hidden and system files kept out of the way. Recommended for most people, with the full set of file, view, batch, archive and conversion tools.

Advanced

A dense, terminal-forward layout for power users — sysadmins, developers and tinkerers. Compact monospace listing, a POSIX permissions column, hidden files shown, and an always-on command line with shell-history autocomplete. It adds a Git status bar, a system panel, a binary inspector, a hex viewer, a package manager (Homebrew / Chocolatey) and an external-tools checker.

Features

Panes, navigation & menus

• Dual panes with folder tabs, independent navigation, selection, per-pane footers and sortable columns for name, extension, size and date.
• Sessions persist between launches, including pane locations, tabs and history; a new window starts keyboard-ready in the left pane.
• Multiple windows: New Window (Ctrl+N / ⌘N) opens another full Commander window on any platform. On macOS the Dock menu lists and focuses every open Commander and Viewer window; on Linux the launcher quicklist offers New Window.
• Native OS menu bar with Commander, Files, Edit, Mark, Commands, Show, Configuration, Help and, in Advanced mode, Tools. Menu commands display their keyboard shortcuts, with Alt+letter menu access on Windows.
• Clickable breadcrumb paths, native macOS file icons with cross-platform fallbacks, per-pane history (Alt+↓), keyboard drive pickers (Alt+F1 / Alt+F2) and directory hotlist bookmarks (Ctrl+D).
• Right-click context menus for files, folders, tabs, trash and empty pane space, including native Windows Shell verbs and platform-specific actions such as macOS Open With, Share and Tags.
• Quicksearch by typing, next-match cycling, list filtering (Ctrl+S, ⌘F on macOS), hidden-file toggle (Ctrl+H), folder tree sidebar, thumbnail view and gallery view.

Viewing, preview & plugins

• Quick View (Ctrl+Q) turns the opposite pane into a live preview that follows the cursor.
• Standalone Viewer windows (F3) support text, source with syntax highlighting, Markdown, tables, images, PDFs, EPUB, audio and video.
• Viewer tools include word wrap, text/hex mode, encoding switch, zoom, rotate, find, next/previous file navigation and a separate native Viewer menu.
• Office/iWork previews use QuickLook on macOS when available.
• Advanced mode adds raw hex view and a binary inspector for executables and libraries, including sections, symbols, strings and linked libraries.
• Viewer, thumbnail, converter, packer and filesystem plugins are discovered at startup, while deployable plugin packages are advertised from the release server so compatible plugins can be installed as they become available.

Built-in editor

• Edit (F4) opens a syntax-aware editor in its own window for local UTF-8 text, configuration and source files.
• Syntax highlighting and code folding for dozens of languages — including JavaScript, TypeScript, JSON, HTML, CSS, Markdown, Python, Rust, C and C++, Go, Java, PHP, SQL, YAML, TOML, Shell and Zig — detected automatically from the file name.
• Save (Ctrl+S), reload from disk, undo and redo, find and replace, go to line, word wrap, and fold or unfold all blocks, from the toolbar or the native Editor menus.
• A status bar shows line and column, selection length, line count, byte size, line ending (LF or CRLF, preserved on save), encoding and the detected language.
• Unsaved changes are guarded when reloading or closing the window, and Reveal in Commander jumps back to the file in its pane. You can also set Edit to open your system's default editor instead.

File operations & batch tools

• Classic function-key workflow: F2 rename, F3 view, F4 edit, F5 copy, F6 move, F7 new folder, F8 delete, F9 new file and F10 quit.
• Copy and move open an editable destination prompt, then run in the background across local and SFTP panes with overwrite, keep-both, skip or cancel choices.
• Recoverable delete moves files to the OS Trash; Shift+F8 or Shift+Delete deletes permanently. Trash views include Put Back and Empty Trash actions.
• Explorer/Finder-style clipboard operations (Ctrl+C, Ctrl+X, Ctrl+V) work for files, including paste into the other pane.
• Drag rows between panes or onto folders; holding Alt moves instead of copies.
• Multi-rename (Ctrl+M) supports name, extension and counter masks, search/replace, case transforms, live preview and collision detection.
• Find files (Alt+F7) searches recursively by name and content, supports date, size, kind and extended-attribute filters, can search inside archives, then jumps directly to a result.
• Directory synchronization categorizes differences between the two panes and copies either direction; Compare by Content opens a side-by-side line diff.
• Properties (Alt+Enter) shows file details and can calculate folder sizes on demand; Space on a local folder calculates and displays its size inline.

Archives, conversion & documents

• Pack selected files into the opposite pane with Alt+F5, with an editable destination and configurable archive formats where supported.
• Unpack archives into the other pane with Alt+F9.
• Browse supported archives as virtual folders, including plugin-backed archive and disk-image filesystems, and extract selected members with F5.
• Packer plugins can handle extra archive formats and report cancellable live progress while packing or extracting.
• Combine multiple files, split large files, combine PDFs and split PDFs into pages.
• Convert known file types across data, image, audio, video and document categories, including PDF output where supported.

Remote, cloud & devices

• Connect to Server (Ctrl+F) opens every remote type in a pane like a normal folder — copy, move, rename, delete and preview behave the same as they do locally.
• SFTP panels use the system OpenSSH client with key and agent authentication, so passwords are not stored.
• S3-compatible object-storage panels browse buckets and prefixes on Amazon S3, MinIO and Google Cloud Storage interoperability endpoints.
• WebDAV shares such as Nextcloud and ownCloud, plus FTP and explicit FTPS servers, connect in-process — no external curl or helper tool required.
• Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive sign in through your provider's own login page in the browser; your password never enters the app.
• Saved connections appear in the drive strip as bookmarks. Every key, token and password lives only in the OS keyring or secrets manager — never on our servers and never on disk in the clear.
• On Windows, Network Neighborhood opens in-pane as workgroups, computers and shares, then continues as normal UNC paths instead of launching Explorer.
• Connected phones and cameras appear in the drive strip too: browse an iPhone or iPad over AFC on macOS, or MTP devices and cameras through gvfs on Linux, and copy media straight into a pane.

Nearby Share

• Files → Share with Nearby… sends files directly to another computer running Commander on the same local network — an AirDrop-style flow for macOS, Windows and Linux.
• This is Commander's own protocol, not Apple AirDrop: it reaches other Commander desktops only. An iPhone's AirDrop panel will not see it, and there is no Commander iOS client.
• Nothing is uploaded and there is no relay server. Files move over a direct connection between the two computers, with every metadata and file chunk separately encrypted and authenticated.
• The receiver accepts every transfer explicitly, and a first-time device shows a matching six-digit code on both screens before anything is sent.
• Visibility is yours to set: known devices only, everyone for ten minutes, or no one. A known device is a Commander key you chose to remember — no address book, phone numbers or accounts are involved.
• Received files land in Downloads with collision-safe names. Folders are not sent yet; select regular files.

Command line, terminal & system tools

• Built-in command line (Ctrl+L) runs shell commands in the active directory; cd navigates the pane.
• Open Terminal (Ctrl+`) drops a real interactive shell into a panel at the bottom of the window, rooted in the active pane's directory. It runs over a genuine PTY — ConPTY on Windows — so full-screen programs, colors, scrollback and Ctrl+C all work.
• Command-line autocomplete is fzf-style and learns from the current session plus real zsh, bash or fish history; prefix matches appear dimmed inline and can be accepted with Right Arrow.
• The command History button opens searchable in-memory output records with command, working directory, exit status, stdout and stderr. History is bounded to the current session and is never written to disk.
• Advanced mode adds live processes, listening ports, open files, installed apps, startup items, package managers, external-tools checks, hex view and binary inspection.
• Configurable button bar lets you add your own command buttons alongside the built-in toolbar actions.

Security, cleanup & settings

• Encrypt files into .cmdr containers using passphrase-based encryption; decrypt restores the originals with the passphrase.
• Optional keychain/libsecret storage can remember passphrases on supported systems.
• Protect Folder revokes OS access permissions behind a passphrase; Unlock restores access. Use file encryption for data that must be cryptographically protected.
• Smart Clean includes System Junk, Large Files, Large Directories, Duplicates and Git repository maintenance, reports reclaimable space and removes selected items.
• Cleanup is conservative: junk locations are whitelist-based, duplicates are confirmed by checksum, and deletion defaults to the Trash.
• Options cover language, hidden files, confirmations, visible columns, fonts, plugins, AI settings, custom toolbar buttons and Normal/Advanced mode.
• The interface is localized into more than thirty languages and follows either your system locale or an explicit choice, with right-to-left layout for Arabic and locale-aware dates, numbers and sizes. Your own data — paths, command text and output, application names and release notes — is never translated.

Feedback and support

Help shape Commander by describing a workflow that could be improved, or send the technical details needed to reproduce a problem.

Request a feature · Report a bug

Keyboard shortcuts

Download

Free to try, then $10 / year to keep — for macOS, Windows and Linux . The unregistered app is fully functional and only shows a startup dialog; a license removes that dialog. Once installed, Commander can check for and install updates automatically, then shows a one-time offline What's New summary after the installed version changes.

Each menu lists the available architectures and package formats.