Features

A complete catalog of what Seek ships with today. Items marked Coming soon are on the roadmap but not in the current build.

How Seek compares

Feature	Seek	Finder	ForkLift	Path Finder	Raycast
Dual / multi-pane	✓	✗	✓	✓	✗
Real tabs	✓	✓	✓	✓	✗
SFTP / S3 / WebDAV	✓	✗	✓	✗	✗
Live git status + per-hunk stage	✓	✗	✗	Partial	✗
Global launcher (⌘⇧Space)	✓	✗	✗	✗	✓
Embedded terminal + history	✓	✗	✗	✗	✗
Clipboard history	✓	✗	✗	✗	✓
Snippets / text expansion	✓	✗	✗	✗	✓
Workspace snapshots	✓	✗	✗	✗	✗
Trash undo log	✓	✗	✗	✗	✗
Inline syntax-highlighted preview	✓	Limited	Limited	Limited	✗
Open source	✓	✗	✗	✗	✗
Free	✓	✓	✗	✗	Freemium

Seek is the overlap: it gives you the dual-pane workflow of a commander, the remote protocols of a transfer client, the git fluency of a dev tool, and the launcher / clipboard / snippets stack of a productivity app — in one native, free, open-source binary you can hit from any other app with ⌘⇧Space.

Window & Workspace

• Single, dual, triple, quad pane layouts (Pro mode supports 2–4)
• Up to four panes per window — add or remove from the toolbar any time
• Real tabs per pane: tear-off, drag between panes, restore last session
• ⌘⇧T to reopen the last closed tab
• Per-window sidebar that can be hidden, reordered, and grouped
• Status bar with selection size and active transfers
• Inspector panel (Pro): preview, metadata, tags, git status, EXIF
• Three density presets: Comfortable, Cozy, Compact
• Light, dark, auto, and tinted themes
• Per-pane font size

Navigation

• Editable address bar (⌘L) — paste paths, drag folders, tokenized breadcrumbs
• "Go to path…" (⌘⇧G) accepting ~, env vars, relative paths
• Forward/back history per tab
• Type-to-select in any view; backspace to navigate up
• Open in Terminal (auto-detect Terminal / iTerm)
• Open in VS Code, Xcode, or your default editor (auto-detected)
• Reveal in Finder

Command Palette & Global Launcher

• ⌘K to open the in-window command palette
• ⌘⇧Space to open the global launcher from any app — files, folders, apps, recents, favourites, calculator, clipboard history, web search
• ⌃⇧Space to bring the main window forward (or open one if you closed it)
• Fuzzy-matched search across actions, recent paths, favorites, open tabs, remote connections, smart folders, git operations, and installed Mac apps
• Calculator: type 12 * 30 / 7, ⏎ copies the result
• Web search: ?<query> opens DuckDuckGo (configurable), bare URLs open directly
• Clipboard history: search and re-paste anything from your last 50 copies
• Every menu action and rebindable shortcut is reachable here
• See the dedicated Launcher page for the full pitch

AI (optional, opt-in)

• Off by default. Seek works fully without it.
• Four providers: Local (Ollama / llama.cpp auto-detected), OpenAI-compatible, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock
• Read-only verbs only: open / reveal / search / snippet / connection / answer
• Path allowlist: AI can only suggest paths you've already opened (recents + favourites)
• Streamed responses for diff and commit summaries
• No telemetry; direct connection to your provider
• See the dedicated AI page for the breakdown

File Operations

• Cut / Copy / Paste / Move (⌘X = cut)
• Drag-and-drop with file promises across volumes
• Bulk rename with live preview: regex, sequence, find/replace, case change, EXIF-based, prefix/suffix
• New File (⌥⌘N) — type any name, no auto-extension. Power-user friendly: Makefile, .gitignore, Dockerfile all work as typed
• New file from template (md, txt, swift, py, json…) with editable templates folder
• "New folder with selection inside" (⌘⌃N)
• Trash / Empty trash / Secure delete option
• Compare folders (left vs right)
• Sync folders (one-way and two-way) with dry-run preview
• Symlink and hardlink creation with explicit UI

Transfer Queue

• Pause, resume, retry, reorder
• Per-transfer bandwidth throttle
• Parallel jobs with configurable concurrency
• Conflict resolution: skip / replace / keep both / merge folders / "always do this"
• Errors don't kill the queue
• Resumable on reconnect for supported protocols

Search

• Spotlight-backed instant search
• In-folder fallback for non-Spotlight locations (e.g., remotes)
• Filter chips: kind, size, modified, tag, content match
• Saved searches → Smart Folders, live-updating
• Search scope: current folder, all open tabs, everywhere

Remote Protocols

Available now:

• SFTP — SSH key + password, agent forwarding, jump hosts via ~/.ssh/config
• WebDAV — Nextcloud, ownCloud, generic
• S3 + S3-compatible — AWS, Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, MinIO, DigitalOcean Spaces, Wasabi (with hand-rolled SigV4 — no AWS SDK dependency)

Coming soon:

• FTP / FTPS
• SMB / CIFS (Mac, Windows, NAS)

Across all protocols: saved connections in Keychain, sync-to-local-cache mode for offline browsing, per-connection bandwidth throttle. S3 also gets a bucket / region picker and presigned URL generator.

Archives

• Read / extract: zip, tar, tar.gz, tar.bz2, tar.xz, rar, 7z, gz, bz2, xz
• Create: zip, tar.gz, 7z
• Browse archives inline like a folder (read-only)
• Add to existing archive (where format allows)
• Encrypted zip / 7z support

Quick Look++

• All system Quick Look extensions still work
• Built-in enhanced previews:
  • Code with syntax highlighting
  • Markdown rendered
  • JSON / YAML / TOML pretty-printed
  • EXIF / IPTC for images
  • Video metadata
  • Archive contents
  • Hex view fallback

Inspector

• Thumbnail or full preview
• Full path with copy button
• Item size + selection total
• Permissions, owner, group
• Tags
• Git status (when applicable)
• EXIF / image metadata
• "Open with" picker

Bulk & Power

• Multi-file metadata edit (tags, comments, dates)
• Permissions UI (chmod-style + checkboxes), recursive option
• Calculate folder size in the background, cancellable
• Hidden files toggle (⌘⇧.)
• Show file extensions always
• Duplicate finder (name, size+name, content hash)
• Select Same… menu — multi-select every PDF, .swift, image, or all-folders/files-only in the current view with one click
• Clipboard history sheet (⇧⌘]) — recent text on your pasteboard, capped at 50, searchable
• Snippets / text expansion — /today, /now, /cwd, /clip and your own; , , , , placeholders expand on Tab inside the terminal
• Workspace snapshots — save a named pane layout (URLs, active tab, view styles, inspector state) and restore it from the command palette
• Trash History — every Seek-driven recycle is logged with size + timestamp; one-click recover
• Pin Tab — pinned tabs survive ⌘W and show a lock icon; unpin from the right-click menu
• Jump to project root — breadcrumb context menu walks up to the nearest .git, Package.swift, Cargo.toml, go.mod, pyproject.toml, package.json, pom.xml, build.gradle, Gemfile, composer.json, or mix.exs

Embedded Terminal

• One terminal panel per window, multi-tab, CWD-aware
• Persistent shell history — JSONL log under ~/Library/Caches/Seek/shell_history.jsonl survives restarts
• Frecency-ranked Ctrl+R reverse search (recency × frequency × CWD-match) over the persistent log
• Up / Down with prefix — like zsh: type "git " then press Up to cycle only your past git … commands
• Tab to expand snippets — your custom triggers + the built-in placeholders
• Pop-out to your real terminal (Terminal.app / iTerm / Ghostty) — guarded if you have unsent input

Git Integration

• Repo header strip per folder: branch, ahead/behind, dirty indicator, fetch button
• Per-row status: M / A / D / R / ? / ! / U with color-coded gutter
• Dimmed .gitignored files (toggleable)
• Stash count badge on repo folders
• Right-click & inspector actions:
  • Stage / unstage / discard / restore
  • Commit with subject + body, sign-off, GPG sign
  • Amend last commit (with safety guard if pushed)
  • Stash push / pop / apply / drop
  • Branch switch / create / delete / rename
  • Pull / push / fetch with remote picker
  • Merge / rebase with abort and continue UI
  • Cherry-pick, revert, reset (soft / mixed / hard)
  • Tag create / delete / push
• Blame view in Quick Look — line-by-line, hover for commit + author
• History view (graph, filterable, search) for file or folder
• Diff in Quick Look: file, staged-vs-working, two arbitrary refs, side-by-side or unified
• Per-hunk Stage / Unstage / Discard — toggle the Hunks panel in any diff and operate one hunk at a time, no git add -p round-trip
• Inline conflict viewer when merge markers detected
• "Open in external mergetool" hook (BBEdit, Kaleidoscope, FileMerge, VS Code)
• Sidebar group "Repos" auto-discovered
• Smart folder: "Files with uncommitted changes across all repos"
• Every git action reachable via command palette

Tags

• Read/write Spotlight tags (Finder-compatible)
• Bulk tag operations
• Tag autocomplete in inspector
• Tag-based smart folders

Customization

• Customizable columns per view, with reordering
• Per-folder remembered settings (sort, view, columns)
• Toolbar customization (drag items in/out)
• Sidebar item ordering and grouping
• Theming: light / dark / auto, accent color, optional Pro colorways
• Rebindable keyboard shortcuts

Scripting & Automation

• AppleScript dictionary: open path, list selection, get metadata, run transfer, switch mode (available now)
• Shortcuts.app actions for the same (available now)
• seek:// URL scheme for opening paths and triggering commands

Accessibility

• Full VoiceOver support — every chrome element and file row labeled
• Keyboard navigation everywhere
• Reduced motion respected
• Increased contrast respected
• Larger text supported up to system limits
• Switch Control friendly

Trust & Distribution

• Free, no account required
• Distributed via Homebrew cask (brew install --cask https://seek.ataiva.com/homebrew) and direct DMG
• No telemetry by default; opt-in crash reporting only
• Sparkle auto-updates with EdDSA-signed appcast
• macOS 14 Sonoma and newer; Apple Silicon and Intel