Cmdr brings the Total Commander experience to macOS, and (optionally, only if you enable it) adds AI features that genuinely help. Built with Rust, it's extremely fast and respectful toward your CPU, RAM, and disk.
Cmdr is in open beta. There might be sharp edges in the newer features (archives, the operation log, and AI), but the core is well-tested, stable software used every day by the author and a group of testers. Feedback goes straight to the developer!
Core features
- Two panes, tabs, command palette, keyboard-first. Common shortcuts like F5 to copy, F6 to move, F8 to delete all work, and are remappable.
- Browse, copy, move, rename, delete, compress/decompress with accurate progress bars, honest ETAs, cancellation. Optimized for data safety, speed, and transparency.
- Queue multiple file operations, send any of them to the background, pause/resume file transfers, view a full, searchable log of past operations, with rollback for anything that didn't permanently delete data.
- Very fast: Lists 50,000 files near-instantly, and the built-in viewer opens a 10 GB file near-instantly with fast search.
- Real dark and light modes, native macOS behavior, and all text color / background contrasts verified against WCAG 2.2 AA and APCA.
Extra features
- Full access to Android phones, Kindles, and cameras over MTP and PTP, up to 4x faster than Android File Transfer, no hacks needed, works out of the box with any USB cable.
- Full access to network drives over a custom SMB implementation, roughly 4x faster than the macOS client.
- Keeps a full index of your disk (fully local and private) and uses it to display live folder sizes for all your folders, and for near-instant full-drive search. A folder that isn't indexed yet gets walked live, with matches arriving as they're found.
- For Git repositories, it shows a Git history, branches, worktrees, and stashes browsable like normal folders.
AI features (entirely optional, can be fully local and private with a built-in LLM)
- With AI features switched off, Cmdr is a complete Total Commander-style file manager. Many people don't like AI features, so they are off by default.
- Switched on, it adds natural-language search: "Find my tax report from last year"
- Smart selection: "Select all screenshots in this folder"
- Chat: "Why is my Downloads folder so big?"
- Image indexing (fully local and private!): "Find me all photos in this folder where a dog looks into the camera."
- Natural-language renaming: "Rename all these screenshots based on their content." The agent can only suggest write operations like renames, you are in charge of reviewing and applying them. If you change your mind, you can always roll back any past operations.
- File organization: "Clean up my Downloads folder" and the agent proposes each move for you to approve or reject.
- It can also watch your folders and raise things on its own: "How about moving that vet invoice to your medical papers?" It only ever suggests, you decide, and it stops on one click.
- The model runs on your Mac by default, so your files and data stay 100% private. You can choose to bring your own OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, etc. key, or point Cmdr at any OpenAI-compatible endpoint to use more powerful models.
Cmdr is source-available under the Business Source License 1.1: https://github.com/vdavid/cmdr