Here is what my developer workflow looked like for fifteen years:
Navigate to a folder in the file browser. Switch to terminal. cd to the same folder I'm already looking at.
Find a file I want to preview. Hit Space. Looks good. Want to edit it. Open VS Code. Navigate to the file again.
Need to SSH somewhere. Open Terminal. Type the IP I can never remember. Check my notes. Retype it.
I tried Path Finder — and it genuinely is better than Finder, better views, dual pane, real shortcuts. But it didn't fix any of those things. Neither did ForkLift. Neither did anything else.
So I built something that did.
Where the Idea Came From
Years ago, before I switched to macOS, I used KDE's Dolphin on Linux. Dolphin had — and still has — one feature that I've never been able to forget: the terminal follows you. Browse to a folder in the UI and the shell is already there. No cd. No clipboard gymnastics. You're just there.
That's it. That's the feature. It sounds small. It is not small.
When I switched to Mac, I spent years looking for something that did this. Nothing did. Path Finder was the closest — genuinely powerful in some ways, dual pane, lots of options — but the terminal panel sits there statically, indifferent to where you navigate. ForkLift is an excellent SFTP client pretending to be a file manager. Everything else I tried had the same gap.
So eventually I stopped looking and started building.
I called it Iruka — イルカ, dolphin in Japanese, a nod to where the idea started. But Iruka isn't a port of Dolphin. It isn't even a tribute. It's what I think a file manager for macOS developers should actually look like in 2026, built from scratch in Swift, native all the way down. And honestly? It has things Dolphin never had.
What It Does
The terminal follows you. Everywhere.
Browse to any folder in Iruka and the integrated terminal is already pointing there. Click around, the shell comes with you. This works exactly the way your brain expects it to.
There's one smart addition beyond what Dolphin does: if you're running a long command — a build, npm install, a test suite — the terminal automatically pauses the follow behaviour so you don't interrupt it with a stray directory change. A banner appears when the command finishes so you can re-enable with one click. No babysitting required.
I use this constantly with Claude Code. I'm in the file browser, I navigate to a component, I switch to the terminal — it's already there. I ask Claude to look at a file. It's already in the right directory. The whole context switch that used to take five seconds now takes zero.
URL bar with tab autocomplete
The path bar is a real navigation tool, not a read-only label. Click it, start typing, hit Tab. It works the way your shell does. If you think in paths you'll be very fast here.
Click the path bar, type a partial path, hit Tab. The terminal below is already in the same folder.
File previews that are actually rendered
Select a file. See it properly:
- Markdown: full GFM rendering — headings, code blocks, tables, blockquotes, inline formatting. Not a QuickLook passthrough. Actual rendering with real typography.
- CSV: a proper grid. Bold header row, alternating row shading, scrollable in both axes. Not a wall of commas.
- Code: syntax highlighting across 60+ languages. Python, TypeScript, Rust, Go, SQL, Terraform, Swift, whatever you work in.
- Everything else: Quick Look for images, PDFs, video.
Path Finder and ForkLift both lean on QuickLook for previews. QuickLook doesn't do syntax highlighting. It doesn't render CSV as a grid. Iruka has its own renderer, which means it can do things QuickLook can't.
Rendered Markdown preview on the right:
Rendered Markdown preview on the right:
Syntax highlighted code previews:
Edit files directly in the preview pane
Any text or code file gets an Edit button. Click it, make your change, save. Auto-saves after 1.5 seconds of inactivity, supports ⌘S, shows a Saved / Unsaved / Saving indicator.
This isn't a replacement for your editor. It's for the times you're scanning files and you spot a problem — a typo in a config, a wrong value in a .env, a stray console.log — and you want to fix it without opening another application. The distance from "I see the problem" to "the problem is fixed" is one click.
Top right shows edit button to directly edit any text-based files:
One-click SSH
Save your remote servers — host, user, port, key path — and connect from the sidebar with a single click. The terminal opens already connected. That's it.
If you manage more than two or three servers you know how much of your life goes into typing and re-typing connection strings. This ends that.
Save a server once. Connect from the sidebar with one click. No more typing IPs from memory.
SCP file transfer
Right-click any file, send it to a remote host. Or pull files from a remote. The UI handles the details. You get the file transfer workflow you'd otherwise have to open a separate application for.
Dual pane
Two folder panes side by side. Drag files between them. This is standard on Linux file managers and was never added to Finder. Iruka has it. Use it for comparing directories, reorganising projects, moving files between locations without losing your place.
Power Search
Search file contents — not just names. Write a grep pattern or a regex, filter by type, extension, or date, and see results across your whole file tree instantly. No indexing required.
Cloud mounts
Mount S3 buckets, SFTP servers, and WebDAV shares as folders and browse them the same way you browse local storage. Your AWS bucket looks like a folder on your desk.
Batch rename
Select a group of files, define a pattern, preview every change before applying. No guessing, no undo required.
Operations queue
Copy and move operations run in a live queue with real-time progress. Large transfers don't block you from continuing to work.
Why Native Matters
There's a reason I built this in Swift rather than reaching for Electron.
Electron apps start slowly, use hundreds of megabytes of RAM for things that should use tens, and feel subtly wrong on macOS — the scrolling, the fonts, the keyboard shortcuts — because they're running inside a web browser, and web browsers are not macOS apps.
Iruka starts in under a second. It uses native macOS frameworks, which means Spotlight finds it, system keyboard shortcuts work, it respects your system appearance, and it integrates with the OS the way macOS apps are supposed to. If you've used Path Finder you know what "heavy and dated" feels like. This is the opposite of that.
The Part Where I Tell You to Try It
Iruka is at iruka.dorienherremans.com. 30-day free trial, no credit card. macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later. Universal binary — Apple Silicon and Intel.
If you try it and something is missing or broken, the GitHub Discussions board is at github.com/dorienh/iruka-releases/discussions. I read every post. Several features in recent releases came directly from user suggestions — that's genuinely how I want this to keep working.
I built this because I spent years being frustrated by a gap that shouldn't exist. A native, fast, powerful file manager for people who live in terminals and codebases. The one macOS should have had a long time ago.
If you've been making peace with Finder, you don't have to anymore.
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