Commander Features

Commander in Advanced mode with two file panes, dense columns and a built-in command line.

Why Commander stands out

Commander brings the fast dual-pane workflow of classic file managers to macOS, Windows and Linux. It is built for keyboard-first file work, but still keeps the visual tools people expect from a modern desktop app: previews, context menus, drag and drop, native file icons, gallery browsing and persistent sessions.

Normal and Advanced modes

Normal mode gives most people a clean file-management workspace: two panes, folder tabs, comfortable spacing, sortable name, size and date columns, hidden files kept out of sight and the full set of copy, move, view, rename, archive, conversion and cleanup tools.

Advanced mode is denser and more technical. It shows hidden files, adds POSIX permission columns, keeps an always-on command line, and enables power-user tools such as Git status, a system panel, package manager checks, hex viewing and binary inspection.

Panes, navigation and menus

Commander has two independent panes with folder tabs, per-pane history, clickable breadcrumbs, sortable columns and selection controls. Sessions persist between launches, including pane locations, tabs and history.

Commander is multi-window. New Window (Ctrl+N) opens another full instance on any platform, the macOS Dock menu lists and focuses open Commander and Viewer windows, and the Linux launcher quicklist offers New Window.

Native menus cover files, editing, marking, commands, show options, configuration and help. Advanced mode adds a tools menu for system and developer workflows. Context menus use native operating-system integration where it matters. On Windows, normal local files can use the Shell context menu so installed Explorer verbs remain available alongside Commander actions.

View options include list-oriented pane browsing, thumbnail browsing and Gallery view for visual directories where image inspection matters more than file metadata density. The active pane can also switch to a Folder Tree (Ctrl+F8) for tree-style navigation, and a Directory Branch view (Ctrl+B) flattens a folder — or only its selected subfolders — into a single recursive listing with relative paths.

Frequently used folders can be bookmarked to a hotlist for one-click return, and power users can extend the app itself: add custom shell-command buttons to the toolbar and register external archiver commands for formats beyond the built-in engine.

Viewing, preview and plugins

Quick View turns the opposite pane into a live preview that follows the cursor. The standalone Viewer supports text, source code with syntax highlighting, Markdown, tables, images, PDFs, EPUB files, audio and video.

Viewer tools include word wrap, text and hex modes, encoding switches, zoom, rotation, find, previous and next file navigation, plus a dedicated Viewer menu. Plugins discovered at startup can route specialized formats such as CSV, SQLite, archives or disk images to the right viewer or filesystem handler.

Deployable plugin packages are advertised from the current release’s plugin catalog. The dedicated plugin page reads the release manifest at runtime, follows the current release path and shows the plugins that are currently available, including version and platform metadata when provided. The Commander page introduces the plugin system and links to the full catalog.

Editing files

Edit (F4) opens Commander’s built-in editor in its own window. It is a syntax-aware editor for local UTF-8 text, configuration and source files, with highlighting and code folding for dozens of languages — JavaScript, TypeScript, JSON, HTML, CSS, Markdown, Python, Rust, C and C++, Go, Java, PHP, SQL, YAML, TOML, Shell, Zig and more — chosen automatically from the file name.

The editor supports save, reload from disk, undo and redo, find and replace, go to line, word wrap and block folding, from either the toolbar or the native Editor menus. A status bar reports 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 returns to the file in its pane. Edit can also be configured to open the system’s default editor instead of the built-in one.

Command line, terminal and updates

The built-in command line runs in the active pane’s directory and treats cd as pane navigation. It provides fuzzy suggestions from the current session and real zsh, bash or fish history, plus a dimmed inline prefix completion accepted with Right Arrow.

Its History view searches bounded in-memory records of each command, working directory, exit status, standard output and standard error. These records last only until Commander exits and are not written to disk.

When you need a full shell, Open Terminal (Ctrl+`) drops an interactive terminal into a panel at the bottom of the window, rooted in the active pane’s directory. Unlike the single-line command line, it runs your login shell over a real PTY, so scrollback, colors, interactive programs and window resizing all work; the same shortcut closes it again.

Installed builds can update from the release manifest. After the installed version changes, a one-time offline What’s New dialog presents the release notes bundled with that build.

Remote, cloud and devices

Connect to Server (Ctrl+F) opens the Remote Connections dialog, and every connection type mounts inside a pane and behaves like any other folder — copy, move, rename, delete and preview work the same way across local and remote panes. SFTP panels use the system OpenSSH client with key and agent authentication. FTP and explicit FTPS servers, WebDAV shares such as Nextcloud and ownCloud, and S3-compatible object storage such as Amazon S3, MinIO and Google Cloud Storage interoperability endpoints all connect the same way.

Personal cloud storage connects with a single sign-in. Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive each open your provider’s own login page in the browser and hand Commander an access token — your password never enters the app. Commander does not store credentials or other sensitive information on our servers: every connection’s parameters and tokens remain local to your device in the operating system’s keyring or secrets manager, depending on the platform.

On Windows, Network Neighborhood opens inside a pane: browse workgroups, computers and shares, then continue through normal UNC paths. Connected phones and cameras show up in the drive strip as well — 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 straight to another computer running Commander on the same local network, without email, a USB stick or a cloud round-trip. Select one or more files, pick the device, and the receiver accepts or declines. Accepted files are written to its Downloads folder with collision-safe names.

Nearby Share uses Commander’s own discovery and transfer protocol, so it works the same way between macOS, Windows and Linux. It is not compatible with Apple AirDrop: an iPhone, iPad or Mac using the AirDrop panel will not discover a Commander peer, and there is no Commander iOS client. For iPhone and iPad files, use the USB browsing described above.

Transfers stay on your network. There is no upload and no relay server — files travel over a direct connection between the two computers, and the transfer metadata and every file chunk are separately encrypted and authenticated. The first time two devices meet, both screens show the same six-digit verification code to compare before you accept. Each installation’s private device identity is kept in the macOS Keychain, Linux Secret Service or Windows Credential Manager.

Discovery is under your control. A receiver can answer known devices only (Commander keys you chose to remember), open up to everyone for ten minutes before falling back automatically, or answer no one. Known devices are not contacts: Commander never reads the system address book, phone numbers, email addresses or Apple, Microsoft and Google accounts.

Both computers need to be on the same local network, and the host firewall must allow Commander on UDP 53317–53332 for discovery and TCP 53340–53355 for transfers. Guest Wi-Fi, client isolation and some VPNs block the broadcast discovery even when both machines have internet access. Folders cannot be sent yet — select regular files.

Language and localization

Commander’s interface is localized into more than thirty languages, including Arabic, Bosnian, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. Settings → General → Language follows the system locale by default or takes an explicit choice, switches to right-to-left layout for Arabic, and formats dates, numbers and file sizes for the active locale. Your own data is never translated — paths, command text and output, application names and release notes always appear as they are.

Security and cleanup

Security tools include encrypted .cmdr containers, passphrase-based decryption and optional keychain or libsecret storage where supported. Smart Clean scans system junk, large files, large directories, duplicates and Git repositories, confirms duplicates by checksum and defaults deletion to the operating-system Trash.

An optional AI Review adds a delete-safety opinion to Smart Clean. It sends only the scanned items’ names and sizes — never file contents — to an AI provider you configure, then flags each item as safe, worth a check, or best kept, and can select everything rated safe in one click. It is advisory only, stays off until you enable it under Settings → AI Assistant, and works with your own Anthropic, OpenAI or any OpenAI-compatible key such as Ollama (a zero-setup Commander Cloud option is on the way).