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There’s no official Total Commander for macOS. The closest thing is Cmdr: a dual-pane, keyboard-first, very fast orthodox file manager built for Mac, with the same shortcuts and very similar behavior.

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And how I ended up building my own.

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Cmdr can browse Android phones and e-readers over USB via MTP. But Kindles weren’t detected. As of v0.9.1, they are.

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Cmdr is a keyboard-driven file manager I’m building in Rust. (See the rest of this website for details.) One of its coolest features is a background drive index that tracks every file on your volume so it can show recursive directory sizes in file listings. The index lives in SQLite, gets populated by a parallel jwalk scan, and stays current via FSEvents ( macOS) or inotify (Linux).

Last week, the index for my dev machine (5.5M entries, 528K directories) was 3.85 GB. That’s embarrassingly large for what’s essentially a file tree with some metadata.

After a schema migration, it’s 540 MB. Same data, 7x smaller. Here’s what happened.

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Last night around 1 am (as you do), I was thinking about displaying dir sizes.

First I thought I’d just do what all file managers do and only measure one at a time, and only on request.

Then I wondered: “what if I used a file watcher to keep the results live?” And then it came to me: hey, what if I scanned the entire drive on startup, and then watched for changes? That gives you a live index of the whole file system, sitting in memory or a small DB.

I thought there obviously had to be some technical limitations that prevent this. But I asked the robots anyway whether we could do it, and waited for the results half-asleep. Then they came back saying yessir, we can actually do this!

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