OwlCommanderWindows file commander
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Feature overview

From locating to acting,
every move a full file manager makes.

The default experience targets the mouse, touchpads and Windows users; yazi's keyboard commands, Lua automation, async tasks, plugin model, virtual filesystem, preview pipeline and config semantics remain first-class capabilities.

01 / Browsing

Multi panes and a numbered, draggable tabbed workspace.

Right-click any blank area to add a pane in four directions, equalize or close them. Each tab owns its own pane layout tree plus an independent Location, back/forward stack, selection model, view mode and preview state — Alt+1-9 jumps straight to it.

  • List virtualized rendering; scrolling never loses selection or anchors
  • Multi-select Space per item, Shift ranges, v visual mode
  • Tabs drag to reorder, pin, tint — the number badge is your Alt+ shortcut
  • Quick Launch pin any file or folder into dock groups; folders navigate the active pane
  • Session tabs, pane layouts and per-pane paths restore on restart
  • Status bar drive letter, label and free space on one row; selected count, total size

02 / Location & providers

Local, Recycle Bin, remote and archives: one kind of location, different capabilities.

OwlCommander does not squash every location into a local path. file://, trash://, sftp://, search:// and archive URIs all have expression, and capability differences are exposed explicitly to the UI.

  • ZIP read-only virtual directory; browse, preview, extract
  • SFTP listing, upload, download and remote ops handled by the VFS executor
  • Search fd / rg / MFT name index; results applied per revision
  • Recycle Bin app bin is restorable; the system bin goes through Shell

03 / Operations

Copy, move, delete, rename — all preflighted and conflict-handled.

Bulk rename offers templates with per-row previews; bulk create generates many files or folders at once; conflicts default to the safest rename rather than silent overwrite.

  • Bulk rename {name} {stem} {ext} {index}/{i} {index:03}
  • Bulk create enter a count or one name per line
  • Paste conflicts skip / overwrite / rename (default)
  • Permanent delete always requires explicit confirmation listing affected items

04 / Preview

Previews without leaving the list, and honesty about not owning local files.

The right-dock preview stays resident; Quick Look (Ctrl+Shift+P) floats text, image info, PDF summaries, video first frames and font summaries over the active pane.

  • Text / Markdown truncated at a byte cap and marked
  • Images bounded by a memory budget; over-budget explains rather than hangs
  • PDF / video via pdftoppm / ffmpeg, falling back to system thumbnails
  • Remote & archive sources stated honestly, never faked as local files

05 / Config & themes

Understands your yazi config, and accepts graphical tuning.

Keymaps, hidden items, sorting, linemode and menu schemes all import; appearance settings cover font, size, light/dark and accents. The interface ships in English, 简体中文, 繁體中文, Deutsch, Français, 日本語 and 한국어.

06 / Development status

Accepted POCs, and what is still in flight.

The product is still marked in-development. The status below comes from docs/decisions and phase acceptance records, not release promises.

accepted

Platform & operations

COM broker, IFileOperation local ops, Explorer drag & drop wiring, Windows directory watcher, operation dispatch queue.

  • decisions 0001 · 0002 · 0003 · 0009
  • decision 0027 op queue
accepted

Views & preview

Large-list virtualization, desktop shell, file viewport, preview pipeline and image budgets.

  • decisions 0005 · 0006 · 0010 · 0011
  • decisions 0014 · 0015 preview
accepted

Extensions & config

Keymap wiring, config & themes, sort-from-config, chooser, plugin runtime and argv surface.

  • decisions 0016 · 0017 · 0018 · 0019 · 0020
  • decision 0026 plugin runtime
in flight

Provider growth

SFTP panes, archive panes and temp-cache archive previews have landed; remote capability edges keep filling in.

  • decisions 0028 · 0029 · 0030
  • remote search & reconnect recovery
in flight

Search index

MFT name index plus embedded fd / rg search; the indexed preview build is verified in dist.

  • decision 0032 name index
  • results applied per directory revision
boundary

Not promised

Third-party terminal-UI plugins are not repainted in place as GUI; that is an unavoidable boundary of the GUI rewrite, not a wrapping problem.

  • plugin compat contract in docs
  • Zed is audit-only, never a dependency