A floating shelf for the files you're working with right now.
drag · drop · stash · ask · share
Inspired by Yoink and FilePane — the macOS desktop is not a staging area, the dock is not a clipboard, and a shelf you can summon anywhere shouldn't cost £10.
A signed, notarized build is available for purchase at anti.ltd/filemaster.
Use discount code READTHESOURCE at checkout for a discount — because you found the source.
Generated by
make screenshotorappstage art filemasterusing App-arently.
FileMaster is a tiny floating window — a den — that holds files while you move them between apps, archives, uploads, and conversations. Drag in. Drag out. Drop a folder, get a zip. Shake your mouse, get a fresh den near the cursor. Hit a hotkey, same. Close it, the contents go to recents.
The den also reads what you drop into it. Toss in PDFs, Word, Markdown, text or source code, hit Ask, and have a multi-turn conversation about them with cited answers — entirely on this Mac. And it edits: open any image into a full editor inside the den — adjustments, filters, crop, markup, redaction, background removal — without ever leaving the window.
Built in Swift, AppKit and SwiftUI for macOS 14+. No Electron, no helper processes, no background daemons. Document Q&A and image editing both run on Apple's on-device frameworks.
| Trigger | Behaviour |
|---|---|
| Menu-bar icon → New Den | Always available. |
| Global hotkey | Default ⌥⇧D, rebindable in Settings. The shortcut in the menu auto-mirrors whatever is configured; turn the hotkey off and it disappears. |
| Mouse shake | Wiggle the cursor in tight strokes — a fresh den snaps open near it. Toggleable. |
| Notch drop | Drag files onto the notch (or the screen-top centre on non-notch Macs) and a den opens below it. |
A den floats above other apps and follows you across spaces.
| Mode | Behaviour |
|---|---|
| Compact (200×200) | Dashed drop zone when empty, file thumbnail / stacked cards when full. Action button bottom-right. |
| Expanded (340×420) | Grid or list of every item. Multi-select with ⌘ / ⇧ / ⌃-click. |
| Ask | A side-by-side split — files on the left, a chat about them on the right. Click a citation to open a third pane with the source passage highlighted. |
| Edit | A three-pane image editor — files on the left (also acting as image tabs), the live canvas in the middle, tool controls on the right. |
Tap the file/stack to expand. Chevron back to collapse.
The ••• button replaces the share button and adapts to selection (or every item, when nothing is selected):
- Always: Open, Quick Look, Reveal in Finder, Copy, Duplicate, Copy Path, Share…, Move to Trash.
- Any searchable document (PDF / Word / Markdown / text / code / …) → Ask AI… — opens the inline chat.
- Folders or multiple items → Compress to ZIP.
- All archives → Unarchive.
- All printable (pdf / image / txt / rtf) → Print.
- All images → Set as Wallpaper, Combine to PDF, Convert Image ▸ JPEG / HEIC / PNG / TIFF / WebP / AVIF (the last two surface only where the OS can encode them), plus Resize… and Compress Image…. Animated GIFs also get To Video (MP4).
- A single image → Edit Image… — opens the full inline image editor.
- All PDFs → PDF Tools ▸ Merge, Split into Pages, Export Pages as Images, Extract Images, Extract Text.
- All videos → Convert Video ▸ HEVC (smaller), MP4, MOV, GIF, Poster Frame, Extract Audio.
All operations run natively (PDFKit, CoreGraphics, ImageIO, AVFoundation — no external binaries). Lossy targets use a near-1.0 quality; lossless targets are exact; video container changes rewrap losslessly when the codec allows. Long jobs show a floating progress HUD; output stages into a new den so nothing is written next to your originals until you drag it there.
Drop documents into a den, hit Ask, and have a conversation about them — on this Mac, no API keys, no subscription.
- Multi-turn chat, grounded in your own documents. Follow-ups keep the thread.
- Many formats: PDF (with on-device OCR for scanned pages), Word (
.docx), RTF, HTML, Markdown, plain text, CSV / TSV, JSON / YAML / TOML / INI, source code. - Hybrid retrieval. Semantic search (Apple's
NLContextualEmbedding) is fused with BM25 keyword search (SQLite FTS5) so the chat catches both meaning and exact names, IDs, codes and figures. Vectors are pre-normalised and scored with a single Accelerate matrix multiply — search is sub-second after indexing. - Cited, clickable sources. Every answer carries a sources chip; click a source to open it in a third pane — PDFs jump to the page with the passage highlighted, text / Markdown / HTML / RTF / DOCX scroll to the highlighted span. One window holds everything.
- Calculator tool. The model can call a calculator for exact arithmetic, so "total revenue" returns the right number instead of a guess.
- No dead ends. If Apple Intelligence is unavailable (older Mac, switched off, or the model declines), Ask falls back to the matched passages with the same citations.
- Notebooks. Save a set of documents as a named notebook and reopen it from the menu bar to ask it again. Indexes are cached.
Open it from Ask AI… in a den's actions menu, the sparkle button on a compact den, or by opening a saved Notebook from the menu bar. Toggle the whole feature, or "passages-only", in Settings → AI.
Requirements. Indexing, retrieval, OCR and passage search run on macOS 14+. Written prose answers use Apple's Foundation Models — macOS 26 with Apple Intelligence enabled. The framework is weak-linked, so FileMaster still launches on every Mac.
Bring your own LLM. Settings → AI also offers OpenAI, Ollama (localhost:11434) and llama.cpp (localhost:8080) as providers. They're off by default and only fire when you select one and supply the base URL / model / key. Picking one means the question and the matched passages are sent to that endpoint; the default (Apple Intelligence) never leaves the Mac.
Open any image into a full editor inside the den — no separate app, no upload. Three panes: files on the left (doubling as image tabs — click another image to switch, each keeps its own edits), the live canvas in the middle, the tool controls on the right. GPU-accelerated through Core Image + Metal; adjustments preview in real time, CPU stays idle when you're not dragging.
- Adjust. Exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation, vibrance, warmth, highlights, shadows, sharpness — click any value to reset it.
- Filters. One-tap looks (Mono, Noir, Fade, Chrome, Instant, Process, Transfer, Sepia), shown as live thumbnails of your own image.
- Crop & geometry. Interactive crop with a rule-of-thirds grid and aspect presets (Free / 1:1 / 4:3 / 3:2 / 16:9 / 9:16), 90° rotate, flip, fine straighten.
- Markup. Freehand pen, line, arrow, box, oval, highlighter, text — pick a colour and thickness. Drawn vector-clean and baked in only on export.
- Redaction. Blackout or pixelate any region; redactions are burned into the pixels, so they can't be peeled back off the exported file.
- Background removal. One-tap on-device subject isolation via the Vision foreground-mask API, straight onto transparency.
- Undo / redo the full edit history, or reset to the original in one click.
- Export to a new den in any format (PNG / JPEG / HEIC / TIFF / WebP / AVIF) with quality and scale — or Overwrite Original (behind a confirmation) to replace the file in place, keeping its format.
Open from Edit Image… in a den's actions menu, or the wand button on a compact den.
Closing a den remembers what was in it. Re-open from the menu bar's Recents submenu and a fresh den repopulates with the same items.
| File | Role |
|---|---|
FileMasterApp.swift |
@main entrypoint, scene declaration |
AppDelegate.swift |
Menu-bar item, lifecycle, activation policy |
DenManager.swift |
Den spawning, positioning, lifecycle |
Views/ShelfView.swift |
Compact / expanded / Ask / Edit modes |
Views/ActionsMenu.swift |
Per-selection actions surfacing |
PDFTools.swift |
Merge / split / extract pages, text and images |
MediaTools.swift |
Image + video conversion (ImageIO / AVFoundation) |
Staging.swift |
Output staging into ~/Library/Application Support/…/Staging |
GlobalShortcutManager.swift |
Global hotkey monitor (CGEventTap) |
ShakeDetector.swift |
Mouse-shake summon |
NotchDropController.swift |
Notch-drop activation |
ProgressHUD.swift |
Stacking floating progress HUD for long jobs |
ImageEditor/ImageEditEngine.swift |
Core Image + Metal pipeline |
ImageEditor/AnnotationBaker.swift |
Markup → pixels on export |
AskEngine.swift |
Extraction → chunking → embedding → indexing |
Chat/DocumentChat.swift |
Multi-turn Q&A with citation handling |
Embedding/ContextualEmbeddingProvider.swift |
NLContextualEmbedding wrapper |
Store/SQLiteIndexStore.swift |
SQLite + FTS5, vector blobs |
Generation/LLMConfiguration.swift |
Apple Intelligence + BYO providers |
UpdateChecker.swift |
Manual "Check for updates" plumbing |
Paths.swift |
App-support directory layout |
FileMaster needs the macOS Accessibility permission for the global hotkey and mouse-shake — those need a system-wide event tap. Files you drop in are accessed only while a den holds them.
What stays on this Mac
- Settings and the recents list —
UserDefaults. - Tool outputs (PDF ops, image / video conversions, archives) — staged under
~/Library/Application Support/counter-ltd/filemaster/Stagingand cleared at launch. - Ask's search indexes —
…/Indices. Saved notebooks —…/Notebooks. Clear indexes from Settings → AI; wipe everything withmake reset. - The Ask chat under the default Apple Intelligence provider — extraction, OCR, embeddings, retrieval, and the written answer all run on Apple's on-device frameworks (
NaturalLanguage,Vision,FoundationModels). No document text, no questions, and no answers ever leave the Mac.
What leaves the Mac, and only when you ask for it
- Check for updates (in About) — one GET to
https://anti.ltd/api/version?app=filemaster. No identifiers, no payload, no headers beyondAccept: application/json. - BYO LLM providers (OpenAI / Ollama / llama.cpp) — off by default. If you select one in Settings → AI and configure a base URL / model / key, the question and the matched passages are sent to that endpoint on every chat turn. The localhost providers (Ollama / llama.cpp) of course stay local, but as far as FileMaster is concerned they're a network call.
No analytics, no crash reporters, no telemetry. The MAS build declares com.apple.security.network.client solely to allow the two user-initiated paths above.
Requires macOS 14+, Swift 5.10, and the Xcode command-line tools.
FileMaster depends on iUX-MacOS — our shared UX layer (settings popover shell, menu-bar host, overlay windows) — via a local path (../iUX-MacOS). Check it out as a sibling directory before building:
Projects/
├── filemaster/ ← this repo
└── iUX-MacOS/ ← shared macOS UX library
git clone git@github.com:anti-ltd/iUX-MacOS.git ../iUX-MacOS # one-time
make run # build, bundle, launch
make bundle # assemble FileMaster.app under build/
make build # just compile the release binary
make icon # rebuild AppIcon.icns from the procedural renderer
make test # swift test
make dmg # drag-to-install disk image of the local bundle (testing only)
make build-mas # Mac App Store .pkg (bumps build #; pass NO_BUMP=1 to skip)
make dist # Developer ID + hardened-runtime + notarize + staple + DMG + manifest
make reset # wipe ~/Library/Application Support/counter-ltd/filemaster
make clean # remove .build/ and build/There are no third-party package dependencies — the only non-system dependency is the first-party iUX-MacOS sibling library described above. Everything else is built on system frameworks (AppKit, SwiftUI, PDFKit, AVFoundation, ImageIO, Core Image + Metal, plus NaturalLanguage, Accelerate, Vision, SQLite, and a weak-linked FoundationModels for Ask).
Codesigning uses a local FileMaster Dev code-signing certificate if one exists in your keychain, otherwise it falls back to ad-hoc.
FileMaster needs Accessibility access for the global hotkey and mouse-shake. macOS ties that grant to the app's signing identity, and an ad-hoc signature changes on every rebuild — so you'd have to re-grant after each build. To make the grant stick, create a reusable self-signed FileMaster Dev certificate once (Keychain Access → Certificate Assistant → Create a Certificate → type Code Signing); make bundle / make run pick it up automatically.