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.
That's not a mockup — Cosmil's window is genuinely transparent, blurring and darkening whatever sits behind it.
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 ⌘], remove with ⌘[, close one with ⌘⌥W
- Dual, tri, and quad out of the box — or keep going
- Every pane keeps its own view, columns, and sort
- Drag files straight from one pane to another
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.
New items always land in the folder you're looking at, never the one you're pointing at. So you make it here and drag it there.
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.
- ⌘N and ⌘⌥N create inside the folder you have selected
- ⌘V pastes there too — same target, same rule
- No making it here and dragging it there afterwards
Start a drag before you've made the destination folder and you're stuck holding it. One slip and you start over.
Park a drag in the sidebar
Drop the files in the dropzone, navigate wherever you need, make the folder, then pick them right back up.
- Park files in the sidebar mid-drag
- Navigate or create folders without losing your selection
- Grab them again the moment you're ready
Folder sizes come one Get Info window at a time, or a setting that crawls the whole drive.
⌘⇧S sizes any selection
Select the folders you care about and get their real size on demand — nothing else, no dialog for each one.
- Size any selection — one folder or twenty at once
- On demand only, so directory listings stay instant
- No Get Info window per folder, no always-on setting to pay for
A name collision gives you a size, a date, and three buttons.
Never guess which file to keep
Cosmil shows you exactly what you're deciding between, so you resolve it with the full picture instead of crossing your fingers.
- Both files side by side, with live previews
- Parent folder, size, and created / modified / accessed dates for each
- Skip, overwrite, keep both, or abort — with the full picture in front of you
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.
Every copy gets its own little progress bar, and a running search gets none at all.
One job manager
Every active transfer and search in one place, each cancellable on demand.
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 big ones get their own sections: multi-pane layouts and stacked search filters.
And the Finder habits worth keeping still work: ␣ for QuickLook on anything selected, the native share sheet for AirDrop and Messages, and every macOS convention you already have in your hands.
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.
Opening large folders
40,000 files · ~2,000 high-resolution images
Big folders are where poorly optimized file managers come apart: the window opens and then fills in row by row, or hangs while it builds thumbnails.
- 40,000 files in one folder
- Opens nearly instantly (without caching) thanks to Cosmil's virtualization engine and Rust backend.
- ~2,000 high-resolution images
- Every one of them thumbnailed, without the window locking up while they render.
Rust-powered file operations
Every traversal, copy, and size calculation runs as compiled native code — not interpreted script waiting on a runtime.
Memory-safe by construction
Rust rules out the whole class of memory bugs that make file managers corrupt data or fall over mid-transfer.
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.
Your files are none of our business
No analytics, no telemetry, no cloud sync quietly indexing your documents. Cosmil talks to our server twice — to verify your license and to ask whether an update exists — and never about you.
- trackers or analytics
- 0
- files leaving your Mac
- 0
- network requests — your license and update checks
- 2
trackers or analytics
files leaving your Mac
network requests — your license and update checks
That's the whole list, and it's short on purpose. 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 a full-featured file manager built to be your day-to-day driver — multi-pane layouts, real cut & paste, advanced search, and deep macOS integration. Finder stays on your Mac for the few system dialogs that require it, but Cosmil handles everything else.
Completely. Cosmil never sends your files, folders, or activity anywhere. It makes exactly two kinds of network request — verifying your license key and checking whether an update is available — and nothing else leaves your Mac.
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 Ventura (13) and above.
There's no trial build, but every license comes with a 14-day money-back guarantee. Buy it, run it in your real workflow, and if it isn't for you, email us within two weeks for a full refund—no questions asked.
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!
Not yet. However, thorough remote location support is planned to be implemented in a future release.
No, Cosmil isn't, you have to buy and 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?
A one-time payment, tiered by how many Macs you run — backed by a 14-day money-back guarantee.
