The Finder alternative macOS should have shipped with
A fast, private, and genuinely beautiful file manager — with multi-pane layouts, advanced search, and every quality-of-life fix Finder never got around to.
Free trial for 10 days
That's not a mockup — Cosmil's window is genuinely transparent, blurring and darkening whatever sits behind it.
Connect to any server or NAS.
All from the same familiar app.
Direct connection through Cosmil's filesystem engine, not mounting hacks.
Cosmil
A server is just another pane
Connect over SFTP, FTP, FTPS, SMB 2/3, or WebDAV and the server opens in a pane like any local folder. No mounting, no second app.
- Copy, move, and drag between any combination of locations: Mac to server, server to server, server to NAS
- Drag or paste remote files straight into other apps; they download as they're needed
- Save credentials in your keychain, or connect for just this session
- QuickLook small remote files (up to 8 MiB) with the spacebar; larger ones download first
Edit files on a server, in any app
Open a remote file in whatever app you like. Cosmil downloads a working copy, watches for saves, and uploads every change back to the server automatically.
- Works with any app that can open the file — a code editor, an image editor, a spreadsheet
- Uploads show up in the job manager, with progress and a cancel button
- Files download before they open, so very large files take a moment
- For long sessions on big folders, copying them locally first is safer
Your NAS, found for you
Click Network in the sidebar and Cosmil lists the file-sharing devices on your local network, one entry per device. Pick one, sign in, and browse its shares.
- No IP addresses to look up
- Pin the folders you use most to any sidebar category
- Give each device its own color so you always know where you are
One window. As many folders as you want.
Finder gives you one folder per window and leaves you to manage the pile. Cosmil splits a single window as many times as your monitor allows — watch it happen.
In the app: add panes with ⌘[ or ⌘], close with ⌘⌥W
Every Finder annoyance you've had to work around—Fixed
You know exactly what these are. You hit them daily, and you stopped expecting Apple to fix them years ago. Cosmil did.
Create straight into any folder in the tree
In list view, select an open folder and ⌘N, ⌘⌥N, or ⌘V puts the new file, folder, or paste inside it — without leaving where you are.
In Finder 3 steps
- 1 Make it in the folder you're in
- 2 Find it in the list
- 3 Drag it into the subfolder
In Cosmil 1 step
- 1 Select the subfolder, then ⌘N
Park a drag in the sidebar
Start a drag before the destination exists and Finder leaves you holding it. Drop the files in Cosmil's dropzone instead, go make the folder, then pick them right back up.
In Finder 5 steps
- 1 Cancel the drag
- 2 Go make the folder
- 3 Find your way back
- 4 Reselect every file
- 5 Drag them over again
In Cosmil 2 steps
- 1 Drop them in the dropzone
- 2 Pick them back up
⌘⇧S sizes any selection
Finder sizes folders one Get Info window at a time, or with a setting that sizes every folder you open. Cosmil sizes the ones you select, when you ask, so unnecessary IO isn't wasted.
In Finder 4 steps
- 1 Select one folder
- 2 Open Get Info
- 3 Wait for the size to count up
- 4 Close it, and repeat for the next
In Cosmil 1 step
- 1 Select them all, then ⌘⇧S
Never guess which file to keep
A name collision in Finder gets you a size, a date, and three buttons. Cosmil puts both files side by side — previews, parent folders, sizes, and created, modified, and accessed dates — then lets you skip, overwrite, keep both, or abort.
In Finder 4 steps
- 1 Stop the copy
- 2 Open both folders
- 3 Get Info on each file
- 4 Start the copy again
In Cosmil 1 step
- 1 Compare them in the dialog, and choose
New Folder, and nothing else. A new text file means opening an app just to save one.
⌘N makes a file
Any type you like, right where you're standing — and ⌘⌥N for a folder.
Open With only lists apps for files. A folder means dragging it onto a Dock icon.
Open folders with any app
Right-click a folder, pick Open With, and hand it straight to your editor.
One flat Favorites list. Everything you pin lands in the same pile.
Sidebar categories you name
Group the folders that belong together under headings that mean something to you.
Finder
Cosmil
No ⌘X. You copy, then remember that pasting a move is ⌘⌥V.
Real cut & paste
Prefer Apple's way round? Set it back in preferences and keep the muscle memory.
Icon view lets files drift where they were dropped, until the pane scrolls sideways.
Grids that hold their shape
Icon layout follows a strict order. Nothing falls out of the pane, nothing to manually tidy up.
Right-click, Open in Terminal
macOS hides this behind a service you have to switch on in System Settings. In Cosmil it's on by default — two clicks and you're in the folder.
Your workspace, restored
Quit with a layout you liked and Finder has you rebuild it. Cosmil brings back the same windows, tabs, active folders, and pane layouts.
The biggest fixes have sections of their own: multi-pane layouts, servers and NAS, and stacked search filters.
See the full Cosmil vs. Finder comparisonFind exactly what you're looking for
Stack as many filters as you need and choose how they combine. Search by name, date modified, size, and more — with full AND/OR logic to pin down the one file that matters.
No index, by design. Cosmil walks the directories you pointed it at, at the moment you ask, and matches names and metadata exactly the way you specified. Results are what's on your disk right then — not what a database recorded the last time it got around to it. Even sophisticated indexes can sometimes miss things.
And walking isn't the slow option it sounds like: 468,821 files, searched in about a second in the clip above. Bigger jobs than that run in the background, where you can watch or cancel them from the job manager.
Measured on a M5 Pro MacBook Pro running macOS 26.5.2
Speed you can put a stopwatch on
Cosmil's entire backend is native Rust — no interpreted hot path, no bundled browser engine. That isn't a spec-sheet flex. It's the difference between waiting on your file manager and not thinking about it.
Calculating folder size ⌘⇧S
~/Documents/Coding · 398,646 files
Cosmil 0.0s| Result | Time | Relative |
|---|---|---|
| Finder | 6.4s | 1× |
| Cosmil | 0.8s | 8× faster |
Both measured on the same M5 Pro MacBook Pro running macOS 26.5.2 — same folder, same moment, Cosmil against Finder's QuickLook preview pane, which uses the same size calculation Finder does.
Native file operations
Every traversal, copy, and size calculation runs as compiled native code — not interpreted script waiting on a runtime.
Built on memory-safe Rust
Rust's compiler catches whole classes of memory bugs before they ever ship, so the code moving your files starts from a sturdier foundation.
Lightweight — not a bundled browser
Tauri 2.0 draws on macOS's own WebView and Svelte 5 compiles away the framework, so there's no Electron-sized runtime in memory.
Make it yours. Pass it on.
Build a theme in Settings: pick the background, text, and selection colors, then set how round the corners are and how see-through the window is. Every theme is a ten-line file, so you can send yours to a friend, or skip the editor and write one by hand.
{
"version": 1,
"appearance": "dark",
"radius": 0.625,
"windowTransparency": 0.75,
"background": "#06141b",
"foreground": "auto",
"primary": "#5eead4",
"secondary": "auto",
"accent": "#0f766e",
"destructive": "#f87171"
}Shortcuts for the muscle memory you already have.
Your files are none of our business
No app usage analytics or collection of your file contents. Cosmil contacts our services for trials, licensing, and updates. Trial checks use hashes of your Mac's hardware identifier and IP address to prevent abuse.
- app usage analytics
- 0
- file contents collected by us
- 0
- service purposes — trials, licensing, and updates
- 3
app usage analytics
file contents collected by us
service purposes — trials, licensing, and updates
These service requests do not include your file contents. Cosmil is designed, written, and debugged by a developer — not assembled out of whatever an LLM produced and shipped because it compiled — so every request it makes is one somebody chose to make and can account for.
FAQ
Questions, answered
Everything you need to know before you switch. Still curious about something?
Cosmil is built to be your day-to-day file manager — multi-pane layouts, real cut & paste, advanced search, servers and NAS devices, and the macOS integrations you rely on, like QuickLook and the share sheet. Finder stays on your Mac for the system Open/Save dialogs, and a few Finder features like tags and bulk rename aren't in Cosmil yet — see the roadmap.
Cosmil does not collect your file contents or browsing activity within the app, and has no app usage analytics. It contacts our services for trials, licensing, and updates, that's it.
Yes, it should for most (e.g. Quicklook, share popover, etc.). If you notice something's missing though you can always email us and we'll put it on the todo list. If a feature is highly demanded and feasible it will be implemented.
Cosmil supports macOS Sonoma (14) and above.
Yes. Download Cosmil, open the app, and click Start Free Trial for 10 uninterrupted days with every feature. The trial starts when you click that button, not when you download. No purchase is required.
After 10 days, you need to buy and activate a license to keep using Cosmil. If transfers or other important operations are still running, Cosmil waits for them to finish before showing the paywall.
No. Every license is a one-time purchase, priced by how many Macs it activates on, and includes free updates across the Cosmil 2.0 lifecycle. See full pricing.
Yes it does, you can switch your theme preference to light dark, or to automatically match your system settings. We built Cosmil primarily with dark mode in mind so we think it looks better that way, but it's entirely up to your preference!
Yes — SFTP, FTP, FTPS, SMB 2/3, and WebDAV, plus NAS discovery on your local network. Servers open in panes like local folders, you can edit remote files in any app with changes uploaded automatically, and you can transfer between any combination of locations. See how it works.
No, Cosmil isn't, you have to download it from the website. This is for a variety of reasons but mainly due to the fact that window vibrancy is a macOS private api, which is rejected on the app store. Also, a file explorer is a complex app and putting it on the app store could limit it in other unforeseeable ways in the future.
Whenever you choose to cut files instead of copy them, Cosmil copies them to the system clipboard like copy does, but also sets a cut flag inside Cosmil. Then, when you paste your files inside Cosmil later, those files will be moved if that cut flag is still set to true (i.e. you didn't copy a different set of files in Cosmil or a different app). Nothing happens to your files if you cut them and forget to paste — they stay exactly where they were.
In the classical sense, no. Under the hood Cosmil is built with Tauri, a Rust framework that facilitates the development of cross-platform Webview apps. Cosmil's frontend GUI is not native, however the backend—which actually performs and tracks all file transfer, search, and read operations—is written in Rust. The frontend sends requests to the backend, which then performs them in blazingly fast compiled Rust. Rust is renowned by developers for its performance and memory safety.
Ready to leave Finder behind?
Try every feature free for 10 days. Start your trial in the app, then buy once to keep using Cosmil.
