The VSCode for Cloud Storage. Browse, preview and search S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob and local folders in one window — and every byte stays on your machine.
Every link below always points at the newest build. Click the one for your machine.
| Platform | Download |
|---|---|
| macOS, Apple Silicon | ObjectExplorer-mac-arm64.dmg |
| macOS, Intel | ObjectExplorer-mac-x64.dmg |
| Windows, x64 | ObjectExplorer-windows-x64.msix |
| Windows, ARM | ObjectExplorer-windows-arm64.msix |
| Linux, x64 | ObjectExplorer-linux-x64.AppImage |
| Linux, ARM | ObjectExplorer-linux-arm64.AppImage |
Older versions, and the release notes for each one, are on the releases page.
macOS — open the .dmg and drag ObjectExplorer to Applications. The app is signed with a
Developer ID and notarized, so it opens on the first double-click.
Windows — It is signed with company's certificate. While you might see Smart Screen when you open the app.
Double-click it and Windows does the rest — a Start menu entry, an icon, and an entry in Add or remove programs that uninstalls cleanly. Choose this one if you would rather not keep track of where a binary lives.
ObjectExplorer will also be published later on the Microsoft Store.
Linux — one AppImage:
chmod +x ObjectExplorer-linux-x64.AppImage
./ObjectExplorer-linux-x64.AppImageThe window is drawn with the WebKitGTK your distribution ships, and ObjectExplorer opens in your default browser on a machine that has none. To get the native window, install it:
sudo apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.1-0 # Debian, Ubuntu
sudo dnf install webkit2gtk4.1 # Fedora, RHEL
sudo pacman -S webkit2gtk-4.1 # Arch
sudo zypper install libwebkit2gtk-4_1-0 # openSUSEOn an older release without a 4.1 package, the 4.0 one (libwebkit2gtk-4.0-37, webkit2gtk3)
works too.
No install at all, if you already have Node 20+ installed on your machine:
npx @knockdata/objectexplorerIt starts a local server, opens a browser tab, and shows the folder you ran it from. Both arguments are optional:
npx @knockdata/objectexplorer ~/data port=9421Windows: "npx.ps1 cannot be loaded because running scripts is disabled on this system"
- Right click PowerShell and choose Run as administrator
- Run
Get-ExecutionPolicy— if it saysRestricted, it needs changing - Run
Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned - Run
Get-ExecutionPolicyagain — it should now sayRemoteSigned
npx then works in that terminal, and in any new one.
A cloud console can list your objects and little else. To find out what is actually inside a
Parquet file you download it, open a notebook, read it, and delete the copy — for one look at one
file. Do that across three providers and you are also juggling three consoles, three sets of
credentials, and a Downloads folder full of data that should never have left the bucket.
ObjectExplorer collapses that loop:
- One window for every provider. S3, GCS, Azure Blob and your local disks in the same tree, with the same keyboard shortcuts.
- Preview instead of download. Formats render in place — including the ones no console will ever open, like Parquet, SPSS and SAS.
- Search across buckets. One query over local folders and cloud prefixes at the same time.
This is the part that matters when you work with data you are not allowed to copy.
ObjectExplorer is an HTTP server bound to 127.0.0.1 plus the OS webview, both inside the same
executable. Every parser — Parquet, SPSS, SAS, PDF, the office formats, the image decoders — runs
in a worker on your own machine.
- Objects are fetched from your cloud provider to your computer, and nowhere else. We run no backend that sees your data, because there is nothing for it to see.
- Credentials stay local:
~/.objectexplorer/folders.json, plus whatever your platform CLI or keychain already holds. Nothing is synced. - The only call that is not to your own storage is a version check against the npm registry, so the app can tell you an update exists.
- Nothing is uploaded for "processing", no file names are reported anywhere, and no account is needed to open a file.
Which also means there is no data-processing agreement to negotiate before anyone can look at a bucket.
| Provider | Connect with | |
|---|---|---|
 |
Amazon S3 | drop your accessKeys.csv, paste a key ID and secret, or sign in with the AWS CLI |
 |
Google Cloud Storage | sign in with your Google account |
 |
Azure Blob Storage | a connection string, a SAS URL, or sign in with Microsoft |
 |
MinIO | your own endpoint, for self-hosted S3-compatible storage |
 |
Local folders | the native folder picker — any disk, any mounted volume |
Buckets show up in the tree once you add them, so a thousand-bucket account still opens on the five you actually use.
Open a table and every column comes with its own shape: a histogram for numbers, a box plot for distributions, a split bar for categories, a unique count for identifiers, the range underneath. It answers "is this the file I want?" without a line of pandas — computed locally, straight from the file you are looking at.
Works on Parquet, CSV, SPSS .sav and SAS .xpt.
Search local folders and cloud buckets in the same run: literal, whole word or regex, with include
and exclude globs, and .gitignore honoured when you point it at a repo. Results group by file with
the matching line in context, and large objects are searched without pulling them down whole.
Any file, any size, straight to bytes. Offsets, hex pairs and the ASCII column, virtualized so a multi-gigabyte object opens instantly instead of after a spinner. Exactly what you need when a format is not recognized and the first 64 bytes decide what it is.
Open a TextureAtlas or SpriteSheet XML and ObjectExplorer draws it: the atlas image with every
sprite's bounding box overlaid and named, aligned to the real pixels however the image is scaled.
Hover a box to read the frame name — no importing the sheet into an engine to find out which tile is
medievalTile_04.
Step into a .zip, a .dmg, or an office file — .pptx and .xlsx are zips too — and browse the
entries as if they were folders. Each entry previews with its own viewer, so a CSV inside a zip
inside a bucket is still just a table.
| Kind | Formats | |
|---|---|---|
 |
Parquet | parquet — schema, rows, column summaries |
 |
Tabular | csv json jsonl yaml yml |
 |
Statistics | xpt (SAS transport), sav (SPSS) |
 |
Presentations | pptx potx ppsx ppt pot pps key |
 |
Spreadsheets | xlsx xltx |
 |
Documents | docx dotx pdf evernote |
 |
Text and code | md markdown txt html xml xsl js py, syntax highlighted |
 |
Notebooks | ipynb — cells with their outputs |
 |
Images | png jpg jpeg webp svg ico — with EXIF, GPS and embedded text |
 |
Audio | mp3 wav m4a aiff bwf 3gpp — waveform and spectrogram |
 |
Video | played in place, no download first |
 |
Drawings | excalidraw |
 |
Diagrams | mmd mermaid, rendered |
 |
Archives | zip dmg apkg, and the office formats, browsed as folders |
 |
Apple | plist provisionprofile .DS_Store — binary plists decoded |
 |
Everything else | hex, always available |
- objectexplorer.com — screenshots and the full tour
- @knockdata/objectexplorer — the npm package behind
npx - Releases — every version, every platform
Under the hood it is a single native binary: no Electron, no Chromium, just the OS webview (WebKit on macOS and Linux, WebView2 on Windows) pointed at the HTTP server running inside the same executable.