Win Finder

A file manager for macOS that feels like home — for anyone who comes from Windows.

🇬🇧 English   🇮🇹 Italiano   🇩🇪 Deutsch   🇪🇸 Español   🇨🇳 中文   🇲🇬 Malagasy ❤️

Why Win Finder?

macOS is a great operating system. But if you spent years on Windows, the Finder feels wrong in ways that are hard to explain: no editable path bar, no inline search, no right-click "New File", Delete doesn't delete. Small things that add up to constant friction.

Win Finder fixes that. It's a native macOS file manager built around the workflows that Windows users already know.

Features

• Editable path bar — always visible, 80% of the toolbar width. Click it, type a path, press Enter. Works exactly like Windows Explorer.
• Breadcrumb navigation — the path bar shows each folder as a clickable token. Click any segment to navigate there. Click the > separator to see subfolders at that level. Click empty space on the right to switch to editable text mode.
• Inline search — search field always visible next to the path bar. Searches recursively through all subfolders by default. Supports wildcards (*.pdf, doc*). Results show the relative path so you always know where a file lives.
• Sidebar — Favorites (Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Pictures), Locations, Devices, and Recent paths — saved across sessions.
• Windows Explorer-style list — Name, Date Modified, Size columns with clickable headers for sorting. Folders always on top.
• Colorful file icons — 404 file type icons from the file-icon-vectors Vivid set. PDF files are red, ZIPs are purple, Swift files are orange — just like you'd expect on Windows.
• Right-click context menu — Open, Open With, Copy, Cut, Paste, Rename, Compress to ZIP, New Folder, New File (creates an empty file with an editable name), AirDrop, Delete.
• Keyboard shortcuts — Delete moves to Trash, Shift+Delete permanently deletes with confirmation, Cmd+C / Cmd+V copy and paste files.
• Type-to-select — press a letter to jump to the first file starting with that letter. Press again to cycle through matches.
• Drag and drop — between two Win Finder windows, and to/from the sidebar. Cmd held while dragging copies instead of moving.
• Multi-selection — Shift+click for range selection, Cmd+click to toggle individual items.
• AirDrop from right-click — share any file directly without opening Finder.
• Real-time file system monitoring — the list updates automatically when files change on disk.
• Extension system — add custom actions to the right-click menu via JSON files. Supports nested submenus, separators, custom icons, and context filtering. Manage everything from Win Finder → Manage Extensions.
• Multilanguage — available in English 🇬🇧, Italian 🇮🇹, German 🇩🇪, Spanish 🇪🇸, Simplified Chinese 🇨🇳, and Malagasy 🇲🇬 ❤️. The interface language follows the system language automatically.

Extension system

Any app can integrate with Win Finder by creating a folder in ~/.config/winfinder/actions/ with an action.json file and an optional icon.png:

~/.config/winfinder/actions/
  my-app/
    action.json
    icon.png        ← loaded automatically if icon field is omitted in JSON

{
  "name": "Git",
  "extensions": ["*"],
  "context": ["folder", "background"],
  "submenu": [
    { "name": "Pull", "command": "cd '{file}' && git pull" },
    { "name": "Push", "command": "cd '{file}' && git push" },
    { "separator": true },
    {
      "name": "Branch",
      "submenu": [
        { "name": "Pull from main", "command": "cd '{file}' && git pull origin main" },
        { "name": "Pull from develop", "command": "cd '{file}' && git pull origin develop" }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Fields:

• name — label shown in the menu
• extensions — file extensions to match, or ["*"] for all files
• context — where the action appears: "file", "folder", "background" (default: ["file", "folder"])
• command — shell command to run, {file} is replaced with the selected file path
• submenu — array of nested items (mutually exclusive with command)
• icon — optional path to a PNG icon file (if omitted, icon.png in the same folder is used automatically)
• separator — set to true for a menu divider

Win Finder reads these files at startup and adds the actions to the right-click menu automatically — no API, no SDK, no approval process. Use Win Finder → Manage Extensions to enable, disable, or delete extensions without touching the filesystem.

Installation

Requirements

• macOS 13 Ventura or later
• Apple Silicon or Intel Mac

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/Skimmenthal13/winfinder.git
cd winfinder
open winfinder.xcodeproj

Then press Cmd+R in Xcode to build and run.

Roadmap

• Option+Tab to cycle between Win Finder windows
• Column resizing
• Icon view and thumbnail preview
• Keyboard shortcut customization
• Community extension library — a separate repo with ready-made JSON actions for popular apps (VS Code, iTerm2, Git, FFmpeg...)
• "Open with Win Finder" in Finder's right-click menu — Finder Sync Extension that adds "Open with Win Finder" to the Finder context menu and registers Win Finder as a handler for public.folder
• WinFinderPicker — allow third-party developers to use Win Finder as an alternative file picker in their own apps. Two approaches under evaluation: a Swift Package (SPM) that developers import directly, or an XPC Service that Win Finder exposes as a system service invoked via IPC. The best approach will be chosen based on architecture and developer experience.

Contributing

Win Finder is open source and welcomes contributions. If you switched from Windows and something feels off, open an issue — that's exactly the kind of feedback that improves this project.

1. Fork the repo
2. Create a branch (git checkout -b feature/your-feature)
3. Commit your changes
4. Open a pull request

Credits

File type icons from file-icon-vectors by @dmhendricks — a fantastic collection of 400+ SVG file type icons, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Thank you for making this available to the community.

License

MIT — do whatever you want with it.

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Built by @Skimmenthal13 — a Windows refugee who got tired of fighting the Finder.

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