Nineteen features in Captain’s Deck, the dual-pane file manager for Mac — built-in PTY terminal, SFTP/S3 remote storage, inline Git, archive browsing, vim navigation, JavaScript plugins, and Norton Commander themes. Every feature here exists for a reason — earned its place by being something you reach for daily. No bloat, no toy demos.
The orthodox file manager paradigm: side-by-side directories where every operation has a clear source and destination. Each pane holds unlimited tabs. Switch with Tab. Each pane has its own current path, history, and selection.
Navigate with hjkl, arrows, or page keys. Quick-jump by typing the first letters of a filename. Multi-select with Insert. Every action discoverable via F1. And every shortcut is yours to change — Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts lets you Record, Add, or Remove bindings (several per action, multi-key chords like dd included), or switch the whole app to the Orthodox, macOS, Vim or Emacs layout preset. Coming from Total Commander? Turn on right-click selection in Settings → General.
Native Quick Look preview for the cursor file — images, PDFs, video, source code, all the formats Quick Look already handles, plus hex view for binary files in the dedicated Preview Panel. Arrow through files and the preview follows.
Press ⌘+F to search — Spotlight metadata returns instantly, then a deep grep takes over for content matches. Quick Search can reach into subfolders too. Tick Regex for regular expressions, narrow by file type, search inside archives, PDFs and Office documents, or search a server’s files without downloading them first. Save a search to the sidebar to run it again.
Finder tags show up as coloured dots in the list, with a Tags column, a Tags editor on right-click, and your tags in the sidebar. View → Group By splits a folder into sections by Kind, Date Modified, Size or Tags. Press ⌘+S to select every file matching a pattern like *.jpg;*.png, and ⇧+⌘+S to deselect them.
Real PTY at the bottom of the window. Bidirectional sync via OSC 7 — cd in zsh, the pane updates; navigate in the GUI, the prompt follows. Full ANSI color, mouse support, and your dotfiles. Dress it in one of thirteen built-in schemes — Classic Green, Solarized, Nord, Dracula, Gruvbox, Monokai, One Half, Tango and more, light ones included — set the cursor style, or Import from Terminal.app to pull the colors from a .terminal profile.
Every file shows its Git status as a badge and a colour — modified, added, deleted, untracked, conflicted — and the current branch sits in the path bar. Right-click to stage, unstage, revert or see the diff, or open the Git Panel (⇧⌘G) to stage everything and commit. In the side-by-side diff, > < and x take or drop a change one hunk at a time.
Tools > Compare Files (F9) for a side-by-side diff — in the built-in viewer, FileMerge, Kaleidoscope, Beyond Compare, or a command of your own. Tools > Folder Sync compares two folders on your Mac or on a mounted network share, and syncs one way or both. Save a comparison as a preset (a Synclet) and run it again with one click.
ZIP, JAR, IPA, APK and RAR — press Enter and browse them like any directory, archives inside archives included. Quick Look or view a file without extracting, copy out with F5, and type the password for encrypted ones. TAR, GZ, BZ2 and 7z extract on Enter. Create Archive (⇧⌘A) makes ZIP, TAR.GZ, TAR.BZ2 or 7z, with an AES-256 password for 7z. RAR needs the free unar tool, 7z needs p7zip.
Write context-menu items, custom commands, or batch operations in JavaScript. The captain.* API surfaces fs, ui, http, shell, clipboard, storage, events, Keychain secrets and more, behind a permission you approve. A plugin can even add a place you browse in a pane, like github://owner/repo. Or skip the coding: the plugin gallery has ready-made ones, from checksums and image resizing to GitHub browsing and Gists.
Column View (⌃⌘4) for Finder-style drilling. Workspaces save the folder or server open in each pane, so a pair you use often is one click away. Dropstack collects files from anywhere for one copy or move. Disk Usage Analyzer shows what fills a volume, Delete Application removes an app with its leftovers, and Split / Combine cuts a big file into parts and checks it back together. The Operation Log (⌘L) keeps a history of every copy, move and delete.
Delete moves to the macOS Trash, which lives right in the sidebar with a live icon that fills and empties as you go. Select something and Put Back restores it where it came from. Ready to reclaim the space? File → Empty Trash, ⇧⌘⌫, or right-click the sidebar Trash.
Decide once what happens when a file already exists — Ask, Replace, Replace if newer, Skip or Keep both — and let folders Merge, adding what’s new and keeping everything already there. Turn on Resume and a large copy that stops halfway carries on where it left off. Brief network drops can retry on their own, copies can wait their turn in a queue, and uploads and downloads get their own speed limits.
SFTP, FTP, FTPS — passwords or keys, all credentials stored in the macOS Keychain. Sync browsing (⌘+⌥+Y) mirrors navigation between local and remote panes via relative path deltas, so a local checkout and its server deploy walk in lockstep no matter how their absolute paths differ. Same WinSCP feature you’re missing if you’re moving over. Saved servers can be grouped, colour-labelled and paired with a local folder that opens alongside them.
Open a file on a server in its app, save, and Captain’s Deck uploads it back. Quick Look, F3 View and content search work on servers too. Copying between two SFTP servers goes server to server, or streams through your Mac without a temporary copy. Type sftp://user@host/folder into Go To, and server tabs reopen when you start the app.
WebDAV, SMB, AFP and NFS shares. Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox and Rackspace Cloud Files. Create share links for S3 files, and for Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive files on an API connection, from the right-click menu. Copy a file’s web address when the server has a base URL.
Amazon S3 and anything S3-compatible: MinIO, Backblaze B2, DigitalOcean Spaces, Wasabi, Cloudflare R2. Browse buckets like folders, drag to upload, edit and save back. Pick a profile from ~/.aws/credentials, and share a file with a link that expires in an hour, a day or a week. Credentials stay in your Keychain, never round-tripped through us.
Five built-in themes: Modern (follows the system), Paper (light, off-white, stays light), Bridge (the deep-navy look of this very website — amber folder markers, JetBrains Mono bundled in), Norton Commander (blue + cyan, with optional CRT scanlines and phosphor glow), and Midnight Commander. Prefer Light or Dark regardless of macOS? An Appearance switch pins it. Want your own? Drop a JSON file in ~/Library/Application Support/CaptainsDeck/Themes/ and click Reload — Captain’s Deck reads it on the spot. Per-pane fonts and sizes are configurable.
Swift & AppKit. Quick Look, Spotlight, and Keychain integration. Stage Manager friendly, Mission Control aware, full-screen elegant. Notarized for direct download; sandboxed for the Mac App Store version. Universal binary. The little things add up too: a search box in Settings (⌘F), list text size on ⌘+ / ⌘-, a configurable sidebar, Copy Path straight from the breadcrumb, folders that auto-refresh as they change on disk, thumbnails in Icon view, and accurate free space for external and network drives.
cd in zsh and the active pane updates; navigate the GUI and the prompt follows. Full ANSI color, mouse support, and your dotfiles. ForkLift launches Terminal.app externally; Captain’s Deck keeps the shell in-window. Terminal guide →
unar tool is installed (brew install unar). Press Enter, browse it like any directory, Quick Look or view any file, and copy files out to extract them. Archives inside archives open too. TAR, GZ, BZ2 and 7z archives extract when you press Enter. Encrypted archives ask for the password. Archives are read-only: to make a new one, use Create Archive (ZIP, TAR, TAR.GZ, TAR.BZ2, or 7z with an AES-256 password when p7zip is installed).
Full feature set. No restrictions. No card.