Filee skips the whole open-an-app, find-the-import-button ritual. Hold a key, drag your files, and a donut of formats pops up right at your cursor. Drop the files on a format and the conversion happens on your own computer, nothing uploaded, no Office required. It has 18,128 stars, 500,000-plus downloads, and one of the widest format lists of any free converter.
What Is Filee?
Filee is a free, open-source file converter built around one idea: converting a file should take about as long as dragging it. It is made by Myeonggu Kim, known on GitHub as KnifeLemon, written mostly in C#, and licensed under MIT. The repository had 18,128 stars and 1,119 forks when we checked on October 30, 2026, and the project reports more than 500,000 downloads.
The core interaction is the donut. Hold a key, Ctrl on Windows and Linux or Option on macOS, and drag your files. A ring of formats opens right at your cursor, showing only the formats those files can actually become. Drop the files on a format and the conversion runs. No app window to open, no import dialog, no upload progress bar. It works the same way for a picture dragged out of Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari: Filee saves it to your Downloads folder, or keeps only the converted file, and converts it. Links are downloaded without your browser's sign-in.
The format list is the other headline. The project counts more than 260 formats across images, PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, HWP and HWPX, video, audio, e-books, archives, fonts, CAD files and 3D models. Most of them work out of the box with no Office, no Hancom Office and no LibreOffice installed. A smaller set needs an optional engine that Filee downloads only when you first need it: Ghostscript, LibreOffice, Pandoc, calibre or FFmpeg.
How the Donut Works
The donut is not just a menu, it is a small workspace. Each file type gets its own toolbar, arranged by dragging, with presets for quality, size and DPI on images, page ranges and compression on PDFs, video and audio settings, and output folder and file naming rules. Press Tab or turn the mouse wheel while the donut is open and it flips over to less common formats and tools, so the everyday choices stay on the front and the rare ones stay one flip away.
Two touches show the care that went into it. First, you can crop before converting: the Crop slice opens pictures one by one, you drag the frame and pick a ratio, and only that part is saved. Second, only formats that fit the files you dragged appear in the first place, so you never pick a conversion that cannot work. Multi-step routes are found automatically, so HWP to DOCX goes through HWPX on its own without you planning the chain.
Beyond the donut, Filee covers the boring-but-essential workflows. Many files convert at once, in parallel. Watch folders convert every file that lands in them. The Home screen keeps recent conversions with thumbnails, so you can open a result or open it with another app. And if you would rather not drag at all, there is a right-click menu, a keyboard shortcut, a drop zone, and a full command line tool.
What It Converts
The breadth is genuinely unusual. Images cover JPG, PNG, WEBP, AVIF, TIFF, BMP, GIF, HEIC, camera RAW formats like CR2, CR3, NEF and ARW, Photoshop PSD and PSB files, and even DICOM and OpenEXR. Output can be another image, a PDF, a traced SVG, a resized or grayscale version, or, for iPhone Live Photos and Android Motion Photos, the video itself. Video goes to MP4, WEBM, MOV, MKV, AVI, GIF, MP3 or M4A, with subtitle conversion between SRT, ASS, WebVTT and others. Audio covers MP3, FLAC, WAV, OGG, OPUS, WMA and more, including DSD and DTS formats most converters skip.
Documents are where Filee earns its keep for office work. PDF converts to DOCX, HWPX, TXT, images or a picture of each page as slides, and Filee can also merge PDFs in an order you choose, split them, take page ranges and compress them smaller. Word, Excel and PowerPoint files go to PDF, and spreadsheets go to JSON, CSV or HTML as well. Korean HWP and HWPX files, which most Western converters ignore entirely, convert to PDF, PNG, DOCX, TXT, Markdown and HTML. E-books convert between EPUB, MOBI, AZW3, FB2 and CBZ, archives extract or bundle into ZIP and 7Z, fonts convert between TTF, OTF, WOFF and WOFF2, CAD files go between DWG and DXF or out to PDF and SVG, and 3D models convert between GLB, glTF, STL, OBJ and 3MF with PNG previews.
Offline and Private by Design
Filee converts files on your own computer and never uploads them. It collects no usage data and sends no telemetry. That is not a marketing line buried in a privacy page, it is the architecture: the conversion engines run locally, and the project states plainly that it only connects to the internet for three things. It asks GitHub whether a newer release exists shortly after start and then every few hours, which you can turn off in Settings. It downloads the optional conversion engines you choose to install, from official locations pinned in the project. And it opens your browser when you click a link.
That matters more than it sounds. The usual way to convert a file is to upload it to a website, which means handing a stranger your document, your photos or your work files and trusting their retention policy. Filee removes that step entirely. It also removes the subscription: the project is free and says it stays free, funded by sponsors and supporters rather than paywalls. Windows releases are signed with a Certum open-source code signing certificate issued to the developer, and every release is signed and approved by hand through the project's release workflow.
The Command Line and Power Features
The filee command uses the same engines and presets as the app, and the installer can add it to your system. Converting a photo is filee convert photo.heic --to jpg. A batch with quality control is filee convert *.png --to webp --quality 80 -o converted. A watch folder that converts everything dropped into it and moves the originals is filee watch D:\Inbox --to pdf --move-originals. The full command reference lives at filee.sh/cli, and filee help lists every command and option.
For developers, the project builds with the .NET 10 SDK on Windows, macOS or Linux, and the documentation covers the architecture, the engine system, and how to add a converter or a new language. The interface itself ships in 20 languages, including Arabic with right-to-left layout, and themes come in light and dark with your own accent colour and donut opacity.
How to Try It
Download from the Releases page on GitHub or from the Microsoft Store. On Windows 10 or 11, run the Setup installer or unzip the portable package and run Filee.exe. Setup is the project's own installer, needs nothing else on the PC, and can add the Explorer menu, start at sign-in, the filee command and the optional engines. Silent installs take the usual Inno Setup switches.
On macOS 13 and newer, which is still a preview build, unpack the package and run install.sh, or open the .dmg and drag Filee to Applications. The macOS build is ad-hoc signed and not notarized yet, so the first start needs an explicit allow in System Settings under Privacy and Security. On Linux x64 or ARM64, Ubuntu 22.04 and newer, unpack the package and run install.sh with no root and Python 3 installed. One Linux caveat: drag gestures need X11, so on Wayland you use the drop zone and the file manager's right-click menu instead. Filee shows new releases in its menu and updates itself, keeping your settings and engines, with a short what's-new tour after an update.
What to Watch Out For
Filee is honest about its rough edges, and there are a few worth knowing. The macOS build is a preview: it works, but it is not notarized, so expect the extra security step on first launch. On Linux with Wayland, the signature drag gesture does not work, which takes away the project's best feature on that setup. On Windows, SmartScreen can still warn about a new release until it has been downloaded enough times, which is normal for independently signed open-source software, and the README documents a specific fix for older Windows 10 machines where a hardware security feature stops the app from starting at all.
The other caveat is the engines. Most formats work immediately, but the ones marked in the README need Ghostscript, LibreOffice, Pandoc, calibre or FFmpeg, downloaded when first needed. That is a one-time setup cost, not a paywall, but it means your first conversion of an unusual format takes a little longer while Filee fetches its engine. None of that changes the core deal: a free, offline converter with an unusually wide format list and an interaction that genuinely saves clicks. If you convert files more than a couple of times a week, it is worth the install.
Originally published at devpik.com/open-source/filee. Repo: KnifeLemon/Filee.
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