SMALL COMMANDER

// Remote files at local speed

A dual-pane file manager for macOS whose remote panes feel like local ones. It speaks SSH directly and never mounts anything, which is the whole reason it is quick.

> ONE FOLDER, OVER THE INTERNET

kernel SMB mount	16 ms RTT (LAN)	6,900 ms
OpenSSH sftp client	44 ms RTT (internet)	570 ms
Small Commander	44 ms RTT (internet)	59.5 ms

Measured 2026-08-11. The bottleneck was never the network — it is the kernel mount, which resolves one path component per round trip and expires its cache in about a second.

> DOWNLOAD

GET SMALL COMMANDER 1.0.4 >>

5.1 MB · macOS 14 or later · Apple silicon and Intel · signed and notarised by Apple

OR WITH HOMEBREW

brew tap deep-on/tap
brew trust deep-on/tap
brew install --cask small-commander

The middle line is Homebrew's, not ours: it asks before reading a cask from a tap it did not write, and without it the install stops with an error that reads as though the cask were broken.

> WHAT IT DOES NOT DO

— No account. No licence key. No sign-up.
— No analytics, no crash reporter, no advertising identifier.
— No third-party code at all: nothing to keep patched, no supply chain.
— Passwords live in the macOS Keychain and are never written to a file, a command line or an environment variable.

Licence, privacy notice and acknowledgements >>