Intermediate G.03.B 5 min read Pro feature

S3 buckets, side by side.

Captain’s Deck speaks native S3 — and any S3-compatible service. Browse buckets like folders, copy objects with F5, and never see an XML response again.

Searching across remote drives in Captain's Deck — Browse buckets and prefixes like local folders — search and copy work the same way.

Connecting

Cmd+K → Amazon S3. Pick a profile (more on those below), choose a bucket, and you’re in. Each bucket appears as a top-level folder; prefixes nest like directories.

AWS profiles

The S3 connection dialog has a Profile picker that reads ~/.aws/credentials and ~/.aws/config. Pick a profile and the access key, secret, and region fields fill in for you. Profiles you’ve saved with the AWS CLI (aws configure --profile work) just show up.

SSO, role-chained, and credential_process profiles work too, as of 1.4.4.4. Captain’s Deck routes the connection through Soto’s configFile(profile:) loader, which calls STS:AssumeRole and materialises short-term credentials when needed. Pick the profile in the dialog and the rest is handled.

Static access key + secret
Custom endpoint (any S3-compatible service)
Per-bucket credentials saved in Keychain

S3-compatible services

Built-in profiles for:

Cloudflare R2
Backblaze B2
DigitalOcean Spaces
MinIO (any custom endpoint)
Wasabi, iDrive e2, Storj

For anything else, point Captain’s Deck at the endpoint URL — it adjusts signing version and host-style addressing automatically.

Multipart uploads

Files larger than 16 MB are split into 8 MB parts uploaded in parallel. You can:

Pause & resume — even after quitting the app
Tune part size per-bucket (1 MB → 5 GB)
Set parallelism (1 → 32 simultaneous parts)
See per-part progress in the Operations panel

Presigned URLs

Right-click any object → Create Share Link. The submenu lets you pick a duration: 1 hour, 6 hours, 24 hours, or 7 days. Captain’s Deck signs the URL with your AWS credentials and copies it to the clipboard. The follow-up dialog shows when the link expires and offers to open it in your browser.

Presigned URLs can’t be revoked individually — they expire on their own. If you need to invalidate one before its time is up, the only way is to rotate the signing credentials.

Metadata & ACLs

Cmd+I on any object opens the inspector — Content-Type, Cache-Control, custom x-amz-meta-* headers, ACL, storage class, encryption. Edit any field and press Cmd+S; Captain’s Deck issues a CopyObject in place to apply the changes.