Features
A closer look at Skwir
Skwir is a file manager built around one idea: you should be able to see what’s inside a file without opening another app, and so should your scripts and agents. Here is everything it does today, from previews and views to search, tags, tidying up and undo, with what’s coming next at the end.
Previews
See inside almost any file
Select a file and its preview opens beside the list: a real reader for documents, a player for music and video, a zoomable view for photos. It’s fast enough to flip through a whole folder, one file after another.
Details, when you want them
Open Details with the info button beside a preview’s card, or press Ctrl I, to see everything Skwir knows about a file: its exact size, folder, owner and dates, its tags, rating and comment, plus what the file says about itself, like a song’s album, a photo’s dimensions, a book’s author or a 3D print’s estimated time.
Click any value to copy it.
A few formats use tools you may already have
Most previews are built in. A handful rely on well-known programs, and Skwir tells you in the panel when one is missing.
| Tool | Unlocks |
|---|---|
| LibreOffice | Slides, and any office document laid out as pages |
| skwir-media and GStreamer | Playing audio and video |
| A thumbnailer or ImageMagick | HEIC, AVIF, JPEG XL and camera raw photos |
| Pandoc | RTF documents |
Inside archives, too
Select a zip, tar or 7z file and what it holds appears as a tree. Click a file inside and it opens as what it is, with dataset.zip › 2024.csv in the header to find your way back. Nothing is extracted unless
you choose Extract Here.
An archive inside another opens too, one level deep. A separate helper reads them, and leaves password-protected ones to your usual tool.
Every supported format
| Kind | Formats | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Skwir’s own reader, on PDFium; Poppler and MuPDF are optional packages. Search, contents, text selection, links. | ||
| Word & OpenDocument text | docx docm odt ott rtf | Read at once, fitted to the panel: headings, lists, tables, footnotes, pictures. RTF needs Pandoc; LibreOffice can lay any of them out as pages. |
| Slides & other office files | pptx ppt odp doc xls ods | Needs LibreOffice and a working bubblewrap sandbox on Linux; converted into pages you can read. |
| Spreadsheets | xlsx xlsm xlsb csv tsv jsonl | Excel workbooks read directly as tables, sheet after sheet. |
| Databases | sqlite db | Each table’s rows; opened read-only. |
| Markdown & web pages | md html ipynb | Reading mode; Mermaid diagrams drawn (with skwir-mermaid); Jupyter notebooks with their outputs. Nothing is fetched or run. |
| Code & config | json jsonc json5 yaml toml + 200 languages | Highlighting in bat’s themes or yours, light or dark; line numbers, folding. |
| Ebooks & comics | epub cbz cbr cb7 cbt | Reflowing chapters, footnotes, text size; fixed-layout books and comics page by page. |
| Images | jpg png webp gif bmp tiff ico qoi tga pnm exr dds svg | Decoded directly; SVG stays sharp when zoomed. |
| Camera & modern photos | heic avif jxl jp2 raw cr2 nef arw dng psd xcf | Drawn by your desktop’s thumbnailer, or by ImageMagick. Thumbnailers use a sandbox when available; ImageMagick requires one. |
| Video | mp4 mkv webm avi mov wmv | Needs GStreamer; subtitles and audio tracks, speed, full screen. |
| Audio | flac mp3 ogg opus wav m4a wma | Needs GStreamer; cover, tags, keeps playing while you browse. |
| Playlists | m3u m3u8 pls xspf cue | Tracks with titles and lengths; nothing is fetched. |
| Archives | zip tar gz xz zst 7z rar | Browse and preview inside without extracting; Extract Here when you want the files. Encrypted ones are left to another app. |
| Fonts | ttf otf ttc woff woff2 | Specimen you can type into, character sheet. |
| 3D models | stl obj ply off gltf glb 3mf blend skp 3dm fcstd dwg | Meshes drawn in a three-quarter view and measured; others show the picture stored in them. |
| Fabrication | gcode bgcode nc dxf gbr drl kicad_pcb kicad_sch | Toolpaths, drawings, boards, schematics and Gerber layers drawn from the file. |
| Maps & tracks | gpx kml kmz geojson tcx fit igc pmtiles mbtiles | Tracks, routes and flight plans on an offline map with distance, climb and time; map files as the map they hold. |
| eml | Headers, message and attachments; nothing loaded from the internet. | |
| Anything else | * | A byte (hex) view, with search and jump to offset. |
This table summarises the app’s preview docs; extensions are indicative.
Views
Seven ways to see a folder
Some folders are best as a list, others as pictures, a board of folders or a map of what takes up space. Switch in one click; each pane remembers its own view.
Plus a timeline
Turn on the timeline (Ctrl Shift L) and a strip of bars appears under the files, one per day, week, month or year. Click a bar to search what changed then. It’s handy for questions like “what did I work on last March?”
Every view can sort by name, size, date or rating, show hidden files, and zoom its text and thumbnails. Open folders in tabs, too, and split the window in two.
Find things
Searches you can come back to
Press Ctrl F and search the folder you’re in by name, kind, size, date, tag, rating or the words inside your files. Alt Enter searches your whole home folder instead.
A search in Skwir is a place, like a folder. Its terms sit in the address as pills you can click to change, Back returns to it, and Ctrl D keeps it in the sidebar, so “PDFs from this week” is always one click away.
- Simple terms.
*.pdf modified<7d size>10Mreads as it sounds, and so dotag:Places/France,rating>=3andcontent:"invoice". - Narrow by. A bar offers the tags, kinds and years among the results, each with how many files have it. A click narrows the list to it.
- Quick where it can be. Skwir asks Baloo or plocate when your desktop runs them, and always checks the files themselves.
- Jump anywhere. Ctrl J and a few letters go to a folder you used before.
- By place. Find the photos taken near a spot on the map.
Tags & notes
Tags that travel with the file
Tag, rate and comment on any file: Ctrl Shift G opens the tags. Skwir keeps these notes where other apps keep them, so Dolphin, darktable, Lightroom, a Mac or TagSpaces see the same tags.
A tag is a place too. Open it from the sidebar and every file that has it is there, from whichever folder, with a bar to narrow by the other tags and kinds within. Drop files on a tag to tag them. The Tags button at the end of a folder’s address (Alt G) shows the tags of that folder alone.
- Kept where other apps look. On the file itself, as Dolphin does; in XMP sidecars, as darktable and Lightroom do; as a Mac’s tags; or in TagSpaces’ sidecars and names. Settings › Notes says which to read and which to write.
- Categories. Places/France/Paris sits within Places/France and Places, and a search for Places finds it. A category can hold one tag at a time, like Status: Draft or Done.
- A folder’s tags. The Tags button at the end of a folder’s address, or Alt+G, shows the tags in that folder alone, and takes you back. Tags show as chips in the trail.
- Copies keep them. A copy keeps its tags, rating, comment and where a download came from, even on a drive that keeps no attributes.
Organise
Tidy up without the tedium
Skwir has the everyday tools you expect, from drag and drop to “Open with”, and a few that make big clean-ups painless.
The Shelf
Collect files from different folders as you browse, then move or copy them all at once into the folder you’re in.
The Trash, as a place
What you delete waits in the Trash, in the sidebar. Restore puts a file back where it was; drag it out to put it somewhere else.
Rename many at once
Rename a whole selection with a template, numbering, find-and-replace or a change of case, and see every new name before you confirm.
Edit a folder as text
Ctrl E opens a folder’s names in your text editor. Rename, move or delete there, save, and review the plan before anything changes.
A terminal that follows you
F4 opens a terminal under the files, in the folder shown, and it follows you as you move. Or run a shell command on the selection.
Drops that ask
Drop files on a folder and Skwir asks whether to move, copy or link them; hold Shift, Ctrl or both to skip the question. Drop an archive to extract it. Cut, copy, paste and Open with are all there.
Undo
Changes you can take back
Renames, moves, copies, files sent to the Trash, tags and photo locations: all of it can be taken back, and redone if you change your mind again, for as long as Skwir is open. Permanent deletion and emptying the Trash cannot be undone.
Big changes are shown as a plan first, and so is anything a script, an agent or a plugin proposes. You see each step, old name next to new, and nothing happens until you confirm. Afterwards a small notice offers Undo, right where you’re looking.
Copies you can trust
Long copies and moves pause, resume and cancel. Quit asks while one runs, then takes back what it left half done. A copy onto a USB drive runs at the drive’s pace, so its progress is what is really written, and a copy that needs more room than there is asks before it starts. Hard links stay links.
Then use Undo in the notice. Sample files; nothing on your computer changes.
Fast & light
Quick to open, easy on your computer
Skwir is written in Rust and drawn on the graphics card with GPUI, the toolkit behind the Zed editor. Folders load a piece at a time, so you can start working before a big one has finished listing.
files in a folder
and the list still scrolls smoothly, with details filled in as they arrive.
waits on a slow drive
Lists, thumbnails and previews are made apart from the window, and PDFs, videos and archives open in helpers of their own.
cache folder
It keeps a single cache you can delete at any time. Thumbnails go where your system keeps them, shared with other apps.
change is measured
Speed budgets are checked automatically on each change to the code, so Skwir stays quick as it grows.
Private & safe
Your files stay yours
A file manager sees everything you own, so Skwir is careful about what it does with it.
Previews only look
Previews never change a file. Web pages, Markdown and emails are shown without running scripts or loading anything from the internet. On Linux, LibreOffice and ImageMagick require a working bubblewrap sandbox; if isolation is unavailable, those conversions do not run.
Private folders stay private
Mark a folder private in Settings and no agent sees its name or what it holds, and no plugin from outside Skwir is handed it. ~/.ssh and ~/.gnupg are private from the start.
No tracking, AI on your terms
Skwir reports nothing about you or your files, and the map works offline. Agents and scripts stay off until you turn them on, and AI will stay optional: models on your own computer first, and nothing sent elsewhere without your OK.
Make it yours
For power users: keys, commands and plugins
Everything above works with the mouse. If you’d rather keep your hands on the keyboard, or trim Skwir down to exactly what you use, it’s all there.
Every action has a name
The command palette lists everything Skwir can do, with its shortcut. Type a few letters, press Enter. In Settings you can record your own key over any default, or choose a scheme such as Vim’s (inspired by yazi).
The same commands answer scripts and AI agents, through skwir cmd and skwir mcp, once you turn them on. Skwir for agents shows how.
Settings apply at once, with no Save button: the theme, icons and dates, the full path in the address, which pane closing the split closes, whether a drop asks first. About Skwir, in the More menu, says which version you run and on what, and copies it for a bug report.
Switch off what you don’t use
Previews, views and tools are plugins. There are more than thirty, and each can be turned off in Settings without restarting. What’s off leaves no trace.
Plugins can come from outside Skwir too, as WebAssembly modules or small programs. Each stays off until you turn it on, and gets only what it declared. Their protocol is experimental in this first release.
Handy shortcuts
| Quick look (peek) | Space |
| Show or hide the preview | F11 |
| Split into two panes | F3 |
| List, grid, columns, usage, map | Ctrl 1–5 |
| Details | Ctrl I |
| Search | Ctrl F |
| Keep in the sidebar | Ctrl D |
| Jump to a folder | Ctrl J |
| Type a location | Ctrl L |
| New tab | Ctrl T |
| Edit tags | Ctrl Shift G |
| Rename a selection | Ctrl F2 |
| Terminal | F4 |
| Undo / redo | Ctrl Z· Ctrl Shift Z |
| Command palette | Ctrl Shift P |
| Settings | Ctrl , |
Coming next
What we’re working on
Skwir is young and moving quickly. These are the next big pieces; follow along on GitHub.
Skwir’s own assistant Planned
Ask for “sort these downloads by project” and get a plan of moves and renames to review, never changes made behind your back. Local models first; anything that would leave your computer needs your explicit OK, and it all stays off unless you turn it on. Agents you run yourself can already drive Skwir today.
Network places Planned
Servers and cloud storage, over SFTP, SMB, WebDAV or rclone, through the tools you already have, with the same previews.
macOS & Windows Planned
The code for both is written and compiles, but hasn’t run on either yet. If you can try it, help is welcome.