Preferences, tab by tab.

General

Open with Cmd+,. Looking for one particular setting? Type in the Search settings box at the top (or press Cmd+F): every tab is searched at once, and clicking a result takes you to the setting and highlights it.

The General tab covers app-wide behaviour:

• Show hidden files by default — whether new panes show dotfiles. Toggle them in the current pane any time with Cmd+.
• Confirm before deleting files, Confirm before copying files, Confirm before moving files — three separate toggles, all on by default. Uncheck any one to skip its confirmation prompt. Even with the delete toggle off, a permanent delete — on a network share or a volume with no Trash — always asks first.
• Confirm before changing a file's extension — on by default. Renaming report.txt to report.md asks first, as Finder does.
• Ask for confirmation for drag and drop — off by default. Turn it on and dropping files onto a pane asks before it copies or moves them.
• Open archives as folders — on by default: Enter or a double-click browses inside an archive. Turn it off to open archives in their default app instead. Right-click → Open Archive still browses them.
• Sync terminal directory with file pane — cd in the shell follows the pane and vice versa.
• Click in pane to activate it (otherwise Tab only) — on by default. Turn it off and only Tab switches the active pane, so a stray click in the other pane doesn’t move the focus.
• Remember view settings for each folder — off by default. Each folder keeps its own sort order, view mode and hidden-files setting.
• Show tips on launch — the Tip of the Day window at startup. You can always open it from Help → Tip of the Day.
• Open Captain's Deck at login — for people who use it as their finder.
• Use Captain's Deck as the default file manager — folders you open from other apps open in Captain’s Deck instead of Finder.
• Left pane starts at / Right pane starts at — Last session tabs, Home folder, or a Custom folder… of your choice. With Last session tabs, server tabs come back too and connect when you switch to them (not in the Mac App Store edition).
• Right-click selects files, like Total Commander — off by default. Turn it on and a right-click selects or deselects the file under the pointer, and dragging with the right button selects a run of files (or deselects them, if the first one was selected). Hold the button still for a moment, or Control-click, to get the menu.
• Strict SSH host-key checking — off (default) trusts a host’s key on first connect; on rejects unknown hosts outright.
• Show debug overlay — floating FPS / memory / I/O panel.
• Per-tab terminal sessions — on by default. Off makes every tab share one shell.
• Calculate folder sizes — Off / On hover / Always. “On hover” is the sweet spot.
• Throttle local copies to — cap the bytes-per-second rate on F5/F6 copies between folders on your Mac (Unlimited / 1 / 5 / 10 / 50 / 100 / 250 MB/s). Uploads and downloads have their own limits on the Transfers tab.
• Sorting folders — a three-way choice. Keep on top (default, classic orthodox behaviour), Mix with files — a sort by, say, Date Modified interleaves folders and files by the sort key — or Keep at bottom: files first, folders grouped below, PathFinder-style. Whichever you pick, each pane remembers its sort column and direction across relaunches.
• Enable type-ahead search — on by default. Type a letter to jump to the matching file. Turn it off to free single letters for custom shortcuts (e.g. Vim verbs like y/p/dd in the Vim preset).

The same tab also hosts the Admin Mode controls (master switch, “always use admin for this session”, Reveal Audit Log, Verify Chain) and a link to open the system Keyboard preferences for F-key behaviour. A Drop Admin after popup decides how long Admin mode stays armed once granted — 1, 5, 10 (default), or 30 minutes of inactivity, or Never — so elevated privileges quietly expire when you stop using them.

Transfers

The Transfers tab decides how copies and moves behave.

When an Item Already Exists

• When a file already exists — Ask (default), Replace, Replace if newer, Skip, or Keep both (rename).
• When a folder already exists — Ask (default), Merge, Replace, Skip, or Keep both (rename). Merge copies the folder into the one that’s already there: new items are added, files with the same name follow your file setting, and nothing already there is removed.

Ask shows the “file already exists” dialog for each item; tick Apply to all there to use the same answer for the rest of that copy or move. When a setting skips files, the status bar tells you how many.

• Resume interrupted transfers — off by default. When a large file copy fails or is cancelled — between folders on your Mac, a mounted share, an SFTP server or S3 — Captain’s Deck keeps what it already copied (as name.cdpart) and carries on from there when you retry or copy the same file again. With it off, the partial file is removed.

Errors

• Automatically retry failed transfers — off by default. Network drops, timeouts and brief read or write errors are retried after a short pause before you see an error.
• Max retries per item — 1 to 10 (default 3). Permission problems, missing files, full disks and cancelled transfers are never retried.

Queue

• Max. simultaneous transfers — Unlimited (default) or 1 to 10. Copies and moves beyond this number wait their turn and show as Queued in the Activity panel (Cmd+Option+A), where you can cancel them. Moves within the same disk are instant and never wait.

Speed Limits

• Limit uploads to — caps copies from this Mac to a server or network share.
• Limit downloads to — caps copies coming back to this Mac.

Copies between folders on your Mac use Throttle local copies to on the General tab. The Throttle menu in a copy’s progress window overrides these limits for that one copy. See Copying & moving files for the conflict dialog itself.

Appearance

Five built-in themes:

• Modern — follows the system (light or dark).
• Paper — light, off-white, stays light even when macOS goes dark.
• Bridge — the deep-navy look of this very website: dark blue panes, blue and purple accents, amber folder markers, and JetBrains Mono — the typeface ships inside the app, so it looks right on every Mac.
• Norton Commander — blue + cyan, optional CRT scanlines and phosphor glow.
• Midnight Commander — dark blue + grey.

Drop your own JSON file into ~/Library/Application Support/CaptainsDeck/Themes/ and click Reload — the new theme appears in the dropdown immediately. Themes Folder… opens that directory in Finder.

Below the theme picker sits an Appearance popup — Match System, Light, or Dark. It pins the app’s light/dark mode independent of System Settings, so you can run Captain’s Deck dark while the rest of your Mac stays light. It applies to system-following themes like Modern; themes with a fixed palette (Paper, Bridge, Norton, Midnight) keep their own appearance, as they should.

Same tab covers split orientation, list font, font size, and row height. The font size can also be changed from the keyboard: Cmd++ and Cmd+− make the list text bigger or smaller, and Ctrl+Cmd+0 goes back to normal.

The Active Pane Border row styles the outline that marks the focused pane: a width popup (Hidden, or 1–4 px — 2 px is the default), a color well for any color you like, and a Theme Color button that snaps the color back to the current theme’s accent. Changes repaint live, and they apply to the sidebar and terminal focus borders too.

Tint the active pane’s path bar and dim the other pane — on by default — makes it obvious at a glance where the keyboard is: the active pane’s path bar takes a light tint of your accent colour and the other pane’s list fades back a little. The retro themes keep their own frames instead.

Terminal appearance

The embedded terminal’s look lives here too:

• Color scheme — thirteen built-ins. Dark: Classic Green, Solarized Dark, Nord, Dracula, Tomorrow Night, Gruvbox Dark, Monokai, One Half Dark and Tango Dark. Light: Gruvbox Light, One Half Light, Solarized Light and Tango Light.
• Cursor style — Block, Underline, or Bar (I-beam).
• Blink cursor — a checkbox to make the cursor pulse.
• Terminal font — pick the monospace family for the shell.
• Import from Terminal… — load a macOS .terminal profile to reuse the colors you already use in Terminal.app.

Changes apply to any open terminals right away. See the terminal guide for the shell itself.

Sidebar

The Sidebar tab controls what appears in the left-hand rail. Its six sections — Devices, Bookmarks, Recent Folders, Tags, Connections, and Saved Searches — each have a checkbox: tick to show, untick to hide.

Select a section and use Move Up / Move Down to reorder them. The sidebar’s width is remembered across launches.

Retro Effects

These effects only show with the Norton Commander and Midnight Commander themes:

• CRT Scanlines — faint horizontal lines like an old monitor, with a Scanline intensity slider.
• Phosphor Glow — a soft bloom around bright text.
• Screen Flicker — a gentle CRT shimmer.
• Bleeps & boops — system sounds on copy, delete and name conflicts (Norton Commander theme only).
• DOS Resolution — big 80×25 text-mode glyphs.

See the Norton theme guide for more.

Keyboard

Pick a layout preset, then customise individual actions on top:

• Orthodox — the default. Vim hjkl + arrow keys + F2/F3/F4/F5/F6/F7/F8 for rename/view/edit/copy/move/mkdir/delete.
• macOS — arrows only (no hjkl), Cmd+Up/Down for top/bottom, Cmd+C/V/X for clipboard, Cmd+Delete to delete, Cmd+N to mkdir.
• Vim — everything Orthodox plus single-key Vim verbs: y for copy, p for paste, dd to delete, : opens Go to Path.
• Emacs — Ctrl+P/Ctrl+N to move, Ctrl+B for the parent folder, Ctrl+F to open, Ctrl+W/Option+W/Ctrl+Y to cut/copy/paste, Ctrl+S/Ctrl+R to search, Ctrl+G to cancel, plus Ctrl+X chords such as Ctrl+X Ctrl+F for Go to Path.

Switching presets prompts you first — it overrides any per-action customisations you’ve already saved. Custom bindings persist across launches.

To rebind a single action, select it in the list, then:

• Record — replace its shortcut with the keys you press.
• Add — give the action a second (or third) shortcut, keeping the existing ones, so it answers to more than one key.
• Remove… — drop one of an action’s shortcuts when it has several (for example, take Backspace off “Go to Parent” so you can use it elsewhere).
• Chord… — add a multi-key sequence, Vim-style (for example t then n), as an extra shortcut for the action.

Reset Selected puts the selected action back to its default shortcut; Reset All resets every shortcut to its default.

Plugins

The Plugins tab lists your installed JavaScript plugins with their version, status and permissions. Tick a plugin to enable it.

• Install Plugin… — pick a plugin ZIP to install.
• Remove Plugin… — moves the plugin to the Trash and clears its stored data, permissions and saved secrets.
• Reload Plugins and Open Plugins Folder — for when you’re writing your own.
• Allow plugins to execute shell commands (dangerous) — needed by plugins that run command-line tools. Leave it off unless you trust them.

Plugins are part of the Direct Download edition. See the plugin gallery.

External Tools (F4 editor)

Configure the editor F4 launches. Captain’s Deck auto-detects what’s installed and lets you point at any binary by path. The default fires for everything; mark a tool as default and add file extensions to its list to override per type — e.g. .md goes to iA Writer, everything else falls back to Zed.

Default Apps

Below the editor list, two popups choose the apps Captain’s Deck hands work to:

• Terminal — the app used by Open in External Terminal: Terminal (default), iTerm, Warp or Ghostty. Apps you don’t have are marked “(not installed)”. Choose Other App… lets you pick any other terminal. See the terminal guide.
• Compare tool — the tool used by Compare Files (F9): Built-in Visual Diff (default), FileMerge, Kaleidoscope (ksdiff), Beyond Compare (bcomp) or Custom Command. FileMerge needs Xcode; Kaleidoscope and Beyond Compare need their command-line tools installed. With Custom Command, type your command in the Command field — {left} and {right} are replaced with the two file paths, for example /usr/local/bin/mydiff {left} {right}. See the diff guide.

Terminal

The terminal’s look — color scheme, cursor style, blink, font, and Import from Terminal… — lives under Appearance (see above). Its behaviour is governed by a couple of toggles on the General tab:

• Sync terminal directory with file pane — auto-cd on navigation, on by default. Suppressed while a foreground command is running so it doesn’t clobber your stdin.
• Per-tab terminal sessions — each pane tab gets its own shell. Switch tabs, the terminal swaps with you. Close a tab, its shell goes away.

Captain’s Deck reads $SHELL (zsh by default on modern macOS); your existing .zshrc / .bashrc / fish config loads as a normal interactive login shell.

Advanced

Some preferences live as defaults commands rather than checkboxes — either because they’re narrow tweaks or because the UI hasn’t caught up yet.

• Per-host FTP filename encoding — defaults write com.captainsdeck.app ftpFilenameEncoding -dict-add ftp.example.com latin1. See the FTP guide.
• Plain-FTP credential allow-list — defaults write com.captainsdeck.app ftpAllowCredentialUploads -array-add 'ftp.example.com' for hosts where you accept the risk.
• Live directory refresh — local panes watch the visible folder and refresh the instant something changes. On by default; defaults write com.captainsdeck.app liveRefreshEnabled -bool NO switches the watcher off if you’d rather refresh manually.
• Diagnostic logging — on by default, low volume, capped at 1 MB: file-operation diagnostics land in ~/Library/Logs/CaptainsDeck/diagnostic.log so a hard-to-reproduce failure can be sent in without flipping a switch first. defaults write com.captainsdeck.app diagnosticLoggingEnabled -bool NO turns it off.