~/Applications/Pathem

A faster way to move through your files.

Pathem is a fast, native, dual-pane file manager for macOS. A Finder alternative for people who want more control, in the spirit of Directory Opus and Path Finder. Written in Swift and AppKit. No Electron.

↓ Download for macOScoming soon ★ Star on GitHub See it in action Free & open source · MIT · macOS 15+

Pathem dual-pane window: a Projects list on the left, a Photos gallery with a large preview and filmstrip on the right, and a sidebar of favorites, clouds, volumes, smart folders, and tags

Swiftnative · appkit

1,000,000rows, no lag

0electron

100%on-device ai

MITfree & open source

~/clipboard

Cut, copy, paste. For files, done right.

Press ⌘X and the files dim until you paste them somewhere else; nothing moves until you say where. When names clash, Pathem asks whether to skip, replace, or keep both, so a paste never overwrites anything silently. And the whole operation is one ⌘Z away from never having happened.

⌘Xcut

⌘Ccopy

⌘Vpaste

⌘Zundo

~/Documents

cut items stay dimmed until you paste · every paste is undoable

~/what-it-does

Everything Finder holds back.

The controls a power user reaches for, built in and fast, without leaving the keyboard.

Dual pane

Two sides, in step

Panes side by side with tabs in each. Copy and move between them with F5 and F6, and synchronized browsing keeps both sides walking the same subfolders.

Built for scale

A million files, no lag

Only the rows on screen are built, so a folder with 100k or even a million items scrolls as smoothly as one with ten.

Keyboard-first

A command for everything

Press ⌘K and type. One palette over the whole command registry, and a keymap where every binding can be changed, so the app ends up fitting your hands.

On-device AI

Native AI that stays home

Semantic search built on Apple's NaturalLanguage embeddings over file names and text, PDFs included, plus an on-device AI command bar. It runs entirely on your Mac, costs nothing, and the search needs no Apple Intelligence.

BitTorrent

A torrent client, built in

Add a magnet link or a .torrent and Pathem downloads it natively: DHT, peer exchange, and encrypted connections, in an out-of-process daemon with a FileZilla-style transfer drawer.

Remote & cloud

Everywhere your files live

Transfer to S3, Backblaze B2, Google Cloud Storage, Wasabi, Azure Blob, WebDAV, SFTP, and FTP. Browse iCloud, Dropbox, Drive, and OneDrive with per-service badges. Every network backend runs out of process.

Terminal

A shell that follows you

An embedded login shell that tracks the active folder. Runs vim, ssh, and REPLs in color, and themes to System, Dracula, Nord, or Solarized.

Git-aware

A list that reads your repo

Modified, staged, and untracked badges right in the file list. Reclaim in Repo separates regenerable build output from the untracked work you would hate to lose.

Organize

Tools for a tidy disk

Colored tags, batch rename, Quick Look on Space, sortable columns, and per-folder saved views and layouts that stick where you set them.

~/built-in

More than a file browser

A native BitTorrent client, every remote and cloud backend, an embedded terminal, and Preview-grade PDF markup, all built in. No extra apps.

Pathem's built-in torrent client: a transfer drawer below the dual-pane browser lists five torrents (Ubuntu and Blender downloading, Debian and an Internet Archive set seeding, Fedora paused), each with progress, down and up speed, ETA, ratio, peers, and status.

Pathem browsing the network: one pane lists discovered hosts (living-room-nas, media-server, OrbStack, Studio-Mac), the other shows a photo gallery, and the sidebar holds favorites, network locations, iCloud Drive, Dropbox, volumes, and smart folders.

Pathem's embedded terminal docked below the dual-pane browser, running sw_vers and swift --version and showing the macOS and Swift versions at a shell prompt that follows the active folder.

A PDF open in Pathem's markup viewer: a line of the document is highlighted in yellow, a red arrow points to it, and a blue sticky note sits in the margin. Highlight, draw, add shapes and notes, sign, and save, all without leaving the file manager.

~/views

Five views. Pick one per folder.

List, Icons, Gallery, Columns, and Tree, on ⌘1 through ⌘5, and each folder remembers how you left it. Flat View flattens a whole subtree into a single list, Directory Opus style.