The two-pane mental model.

The orthodox file manager philosophy

Captain’s Deck follows the design Norton Commander pioneered in 1986 — two panels, side-by-side, every file operation visible at a glance.

• Left pane. Source or working directory.
• Right pane. Destination or comparison directory.
• Active pane. The one with focus, marked with a coloured border and a tinted path bar; the other pane is slightly dimmed.

Interface layout

Top — tab bar

Each pane keeps its own stack of tabs. Open as many locations as you like:

• Cmd+T — new tab in the active pane
• Cmd+W — close current tab
• Shift+Cmd+] / Shift+Cmd+[ — next / previous tab

A tab is named after the folder it shows — or, at the top level of a server, an archive or a plugin location such as GitHub, after that place.

Header — breadcrumb path

Above each panel, the current location is spelled out as clickable path segments. Click any segment to jump straight to that folder. Right-click a segment to Copy Path — the full path to that folder lands on the clipboard, ready to paste into a shell or a Go To dialog.

Middle — file panels

Each panel shows directory contents in columns:

• Name (with icon)
• Size
• Date modified
• Permissions (optional, on by default for power users)

Right-click any column header to show, hide, or reorder columns.

In a narrow pane, names keep room for about 32 characters: the other columns step aside one by one, least needed first (Group, Owner and Permissions go before Date and Size), and come back as soon as the pane is wide enough. Your column choices don’t change.

Finder tags

Captain’s Deck shows the same tags as Finder. Tagged files get small coloured dots right after their name, and you can turn on a Tags column from the column header menu.

• Right-click → Tags — tick or untick any of the seven colour tags in one click.
• Right-click → Tags… — opens the Tags editor, where you can pick colours, type your own tags, and remove ones you don’t want. With several files selected, new tags are added to all of them.

Tags work on files on your Mac, and they keep their Finder colour.

Bottom — function key bar

The classic F1–F10 row — always visible, always one key away.

Switching between panes

The active pane is marked by a highlighted border, a lightly tinted path bar, and the other pane’s list fading back a little (turn the tint and fade off in Settings → Appearance). Switch focus with:

• Tab — toggle left ↔ right
• Click anywhere in a pane to activate it

Navigating files

Vim-style and traditional navigation both work, side by side:

These are the default (Orthodox) keys. With the macOS keyboard preset, Cmd+↑ and Cmd+↓ jump to the top and bottom instead.

A mouse’s side buttons go back and forward through the folders you’ve visited, like a three-finger swipe on the trackpad.

Files on a server or inside an archive open like any other: Enter or a double-click opens a temporary copy in the file’s app, and F3 shows it in the viewer. The copy is read-only — to change a server file and save it back, use F4.

Selecting files

Selection is the bridge between navigation and action.

• Space — toggle selection on current file (then move down)
• Cmd+A — select all
• Ctrl+Cmd+A — deselect all
• Cmd+Option+I — invert selection
• Shift+navigation — extend selection while moving
• Right-click — if you’ve turned on Right-click selects files in Settings → General, as in Total Commander: right-click selects or deselects a file, and dragging with the right button selects a run of them. Hold the button still, or Control-click, for the menu.

The status bar shows the count and total size of selected items.

Select by pattern

Press Cmd+S (Edit → Select by Pattern…) and type a pattern to select every matching file. Use * for any characters and ? for one character, and separate several patterns with a semicolon — for example *.jpg;*.png. A pattern without wildcards matches any name that contains it. Tick Include folders to match folders too.

Cmd+Shift+S (Deselect by Pattern…) does the opposite. If your keyboard has a number pad, + selects by pattern, − deselects, and * inverts the selection.

The Edit menu works on files

While a pane has focus, Edit → Cut, Copy and Paste work on the selected files. Undo and Redo take back your last file operation, and the menu says what it will undo — for example Undo Duplicate.

Quick filter

Press / to filter the current view. Type to narrow; only matching files stay visible.

• Case-insensitive
• Matches anywhere in the filename
• Esc clears the filter

The sidebar

A rail down the left edge collects the places you reach for most. It groups into six sections: Devices, Bookmarks, Recent Folders, Tags, Connections, and Saved Searches.

The Tags section lists your Finder tags. Click one to find every file with that tag.

Make it yours

Settings has its own Sidebar tab. Untick any of the six sections to hide it, or select one and use Move Up / Move Down to reorder them into the order that suits you.

Devices

• Free space per drive. Every mounted volume shows its available space — not just the internal disk, but external drives and network shares too.
• Trash. The Trash sits under Devices with a live icon: it fills in when there’s something inside and stays an outline when it’s empty. Browse into it and right-click an item for Put Back — this works for things you deleted in Finder or another app too, not only in Captain’s Deck.

Drag the sidebar’s edge to set its width — it stays put across launches.

Hidden files, sorting, and the terminal

Hidden files

Toggle dotfiles with Cmd+. (period).

Sorting

Click any column header to sort. Click again to reverse.

View → Sort By lists every way to sort, including ones that don’t need a visible column: Kind, Date Created, Date Last Opened and Tags. Pick Ascending or Descending at the bottom of the same menu.

Group By

View → Group By splits the list into titled sections by Kind, Date Modified, Size or Tags. Choose None to go back to a plain list. Grouping works in List view; the other views keep the plain list.

Default view settings

View → Use as Defaults saves the active pane’s sort order, view mode and hidden-files setting as the default for every folder that doesn’t have its own settings. View → Restore Default View Settings makes the current folder forget its own settings and go back to the defaults.

Themes

Pick a theme from View → Theme, or press Cmd+Option+T (Next Theme) to step through them one by one.

Answering dialogs with one key

Every button in a dialog has one underlined letter. Press that letter to click it — O for Overwrite, S for Skip, and so on. Return and Esc work as before.

Size bars and folder sizes

View → Show Size Bars draws a small bar under each size, so the biggest items in a folder stand out at a glance. Whenever you want real folder sizes, choose View → Calculate Folder Sizes (Option+Shift+Return) to work out the size of the selected folders — or, with nothing selected, every folder in the pane. It works on folders on your Mac; to have sizes calculated automatically, see Calculate folder sizes in Settings → General.

When a folder can’t be opened

Instead of leaving you with an empty pane, Captain’s Deck says what went wrong. A folder you can’t read shows Can’t open this folder with the reason (no permission, or it no longer exists) and Try Again / Go Back buttons. On a server pane, a lost connection shows Disconnected with a Reconnect button.

Thumbnails in Icon view

Switch a pane to Icon view and image files render as real thumbnails, so you can pick the right photo without opening it.

Live folder updates

The list keeps itself current. When another app adds, removes, or renames a file in the folder you’re looking at, the pane refreshes on its own — no Cmd+R needed.

The terminal panel

Press ` (backtick) to toggle the integrated terminal at the bottom of the window. It auto-syncs with the active pane’s directory — see the terminal guide.