NorthPane app icon NorthPane · In development

Two panes. Ten F-keys. Any server.

NorthPane is a dual-pane file manager for macOS in the Total Commander tradition, built native in SwiftUI. Local folders and SFTP or FTP servers live behind the same two panes. F5 copies between Mac and server exactly the way it copies between two local folders.

StatusIN DEVELOPMENT
PlatformMAC · MACOS 14+
LanguagesEN · CS · DE · ES
TargetMAC APP STORE
Sandboxed, localized, feature-complete. App Store paperwork is most of what's left.
01 · What it does

Total Commander manners, macOS habits.

  • Two panes, many tabs Each tab keeps its own path, history, selection, sorting, and its own server connection. ⌘T opens one, ⌃Tab cycles them.
  • The classic keyboard F3 view, F4 edit, F5 copy, F6 move, F7 new folder, F8 delete, F9 terminal, plus ⌥F1/⌥F2 for the drive list, exactly where thirty years of muscle memory expect it.
  • Servers as first-class panes SFTP with password or OpenSSH key, FTP and FTPS in either pane. Search, checksums, and the viewer all work over the connection too.
  • Trust done right SSH host keys are checked against your own ~/.ssh/known_hosts, hashed entries included, and a changed key is refused outright, never prompted away.
  • Zip as a folder Enter walks into an archive and F5 copies out of it; ⌥F5 packs, ⌥F9 unpacks. The ZIP engine is written by hand on Apple's public Compression framework.
  • Find, compare, verify Recursive search with commander-style masks, directory compare, content compare with a patience diff, and checksum files that md5sum and shasum accept verbatim.
02 · A look inside

One window, from panes to bytes.

NorthPane main window with two panes over a local folder
Both panes on a local project: sortable columns, tabs, and free space in the status bar
NorthPane in the Norton theme with a blue EGA palette
The Norton theme: a blue EGA palette for the nostalgic
Built-in editor showing C++ code with syntax highlighting
The F4 editor: single-pass syntax highlighting for 23 languages, shaders included
Hex view of a Mach-O binary with colored bytes and the ARM64 disassembly panel
The hex view speaks HIEW: offset jumps, byte search, and ⌘D disassembly via Capstone
Markdown file rendered as a formatted preview
Markdown opens rendered: headings, tables, code, and images, even over SFTP
3D preview of an FBX model of a floppy disk in the viewer
An FBX model on the F3 turntable, parsed and rendered by NorthPane itself, texture and all
03 · The viewer

F3 went a little further than it had to.

  • Text and hex, remembered A reader on F3, an editor on F4, legacy encodings detected, and a cursor that returns to where you left every file, even after a restart.
  • Rendered documents Markdown with images, PDF, SVG kept as vectors, and every bitmap format the system knows. All loaded through the pane's own provider, so remote files preview like local ones.
  • A real disassembler ⌘D in the hex view decodes ARM64 and x86 via Capstone, seeded by reading just enough Mach-O to find the code.
  • 3D models FBX files, in the text or the binary flavour, get parsed, triangulated, textured, and put on a turntable. No engine, no import library.
04 · Under the hood

Built by hand, on purpose.

The interesting parts are not wrappers. The ZIP reader and writer are implemented against the raw format (data descriptors, zip64, and a zip-slip guard included), because every shortcut macOS offers turned out to have a hole in it. The FBX parser, the patience diff, the single-pass syntax highlighter, and the coreutils-compatible checksum escaping are the same story: small, verified implementations instead of dependencies. The app is fully sandboxed, ships a privacy manifest, and phones nobody.

Release

Want to know when it ships?

NorthPane is heading to the Mac App Store. Follow the news feed, subscribe via RSS, or drop me an email and I'll let you know.