Early build · 1.0.0 · Windows, macOS, Linux
A dual-pane file manager in the Total Commander tradition, built entirely in Flutter and extended with Python. The core does one thing: manage files in two panels. Network transports, viewers, editors, archive support — every one of them is an extension.
The list of features is not the interesting question. The interesting question is what it does that the one you already have does not.
Copy, move, delete, rename, create folder — across any two file systems, with the orthodox commander bindings exactly where they have always been.
Commands act on the marks, or — when nothing is marked — on the row under the cursor. One rule, no dialog asking which you meant.
F3 view, F4 edit, F5 copy, F6 move, F8 delete. Every switch has a letter, and the letter is shown next to the switch that does the same thing — a control only the mouse can reach is not a control.
The drive drops the drives-and-connections menu — including the stick you plugged in while the menu was open. Every level above the current folder is a button that goes back to it.
Extensions
The way it works in Blender. Two runtimes, and you take the weaker one that does the job.
Python — real code
Arbitrary code in its own process, talking to the app over JSON-RPC. Plugins target one pinned Python 3.12 the app carries itself, so a plugin written once behaves the same on every platform.
from xverb import Plugin, table
plugin = Plugin("com.example.zip")
@plugin.viewer("zip.list", "Contents", extensions=["zip"])
def view(url):
... # read_file works on any file system
plugin.run()Declarative — data, no code
No code and no interpreter, so it loads on the platforms where running plugin code is impossible at all — iPhone included. The bundled text, image, CSV and JSON viewers are nothing but this.
{
"id": "com.example.csv", "apiVersion": 1,
"runtime": "declarative",
"viewers": [{
"title": "Table", "extensions": ["csv"],
"render": { "kind": "table",
"source": "csv" }
}]
}The proof is that FTP is a plugin.
Not because it had to be, but so that the plugin surface has to be good enough to build a real file system on. Enter on a .zip opens it as a folder — and the core never learns what a ZIP is.
Settings → Plugins is a feed of everything the app knows about. Install is one press.
The viewer
Code is coloured by grammars that ship as data in a plugin, scanned by one scanner in the host. A grammar names roles rather than colours — so the palette decides what a keyword looks like, and a new language is a file rather than a release.
14class Plugin:
15 # one process, one channel
16 def __init__(self, ident):
17 self.ident = ident
18 self.views = {}
19
20 def viewer(self, ident, title):
21 """Claim an extension."""
22 return self._register(ident)Every other reader draws the page, and drawing the page is the problem. A PDF is a set of instructions for putting marks on paper, so a viewer that follows them faithfully hands you back the paper — the margins, the furniture, and a line break every sixty characters that no reader wants.
No PDFium, no system engine, no raster mode. The reader is Python on the standard library, about two thousand lines, identical on all three systems — which also meant writing out RC4 and AES, because a locked PDF is usually locked with an empty password.
Roughly two documents in five carry the tags that say what is a heading and what is a table; for those the reading is simply right. Without them it is worked out from the page, and the reading says at the top when it is a guess. A scan has no text in it at all, and this says so in a sentence rather than showing an empty page.
Pictures
Full screen, with a strip of the neighbours standing on the picture itself — no band, no bar, no panel. The picture runs the whole height of the window and passes underneath the thumbnails.
A thumbnail is the shape of its picture, and they all stand on one floor: a portrait fills the height and is narrow, a landscape runs out of width first and stands lower.
Down in a listing is the next file; press F3 and Down is still the next file. While the strip is up the arrows walk the folder and the picture is panned with Shift; T puts the strip away and all four are the picture's again. The rule is never in anybody's memory — it is on the screen.
Walking to the next photograph does not empty the page. The one on screen holds full opacity until the last fifth of the fade, and the new one arrives over it — two pictures crossing at half opacity are together dimmer than either was alone, and that dip is a blink drawn slowly.
Fit puts the whole picture inside the window and never enlarges. Fill puts the window inside the picture, so there is nothing down the sides. 1:1 counts device pixels, so one pixel of the file lands on one pixel of the screen. Whichever you chose is remembered — next picture, next session.
Appearance
Every colour is chosen by pointing at the thing it paints in a live preview of the window, rather than by finding a row named after it in a list.
Colours come in pairs, a fill and its ink together, never one without the other: a palette that recoloured a surface and left the writing on it unreadable is not a palette. A saved palette carries the whole appearance — font, density, opacity, every pair — and it is a file, so it can be passed around.
Nothing changes in a single frame. Every movement has to state something true: a listing being left goes out and the one arrived in comes in; opening a folder moves forward and leaving one moves back, so the direction says which way you went.
One scale sets all of it. At Off nothing runs at all — off means off, not “very fast”.
Platforms
Spawning a Python interpreter is not possible on iOS at all, and impractical on Android without embedding a runtime. Declarative extensions cover that gap for viewing.
| Platform | Core | Declarative | Python plugins |
|---|---|---|---|
| Windows | ● | ● | ● |
| macOS | ● | ● | ● |
| Linux | ● | ● | ● |
| Android | ● | ● | — |
| iOS | ● | ● | — |
Status: early. Builds and runs on Windows; other platforms are less travelled.
Language
English, Russian, Spanish, German, French, Korean and Japanese travel in the app bundle — a language is not a plugin, so the interface is readable on a machine with nothing installed. The key is the English sentence, which is why a missing translation degrades to English by construction rather than by a rule someone has to remember.
Download
The archive and the installer beside it. The target machine needs no clone, no Flutter SDK and no network. It installs where it can rather than failing with a permission error, so neither sudo nor “Run as administrator” is required to end up with a working application.
install.ps1
Start menu shortcut and an Apps & features entry
Get it on GitHub →
macOS
sh install.sh
Installs to /Applications, or ~/Applications when it is not yours to write
Get it on GitHub →
Linux
sh install.sh
An xverb command and a desktop entry
Get it on GitHub →
To remove it: sh install.sh --uninstall. Settings, connections and installed plugins are left in place.