Double Commander Plugins for macOS
Native plugins for Double Commander on macOS,
built to a consistent engineering standard: universal binaries (Apple Silicon +
Intel), headless tests, CI, and a layered safety gate before anything ships.
Five plugins cover Markdown, e-books, images and PDFs, spreadsheet previews, and
media metadata. The viewers open inside Double Commander's F3 viewer and Quick
View. All use the Total Commander WLX/WDX plugin ABI and work offline.
This repo is also a worked example of how I build small native tools end-to-end —
investigate the platform, prove the mechanism with a focused test before writing the
feature, fix root causes instead of papering over them, and keep the result
reproducible and documented.
Plugins
| Plugin | Type | What it does | Status |
|---|
markdown-wlx | WLX (lister) | Renders Markdown beautifully in DC's viewer (F3) — GitHub-style CSS, syntax highlighting, tables, task lists, Mermaid diagrams, KaTeX math, configurable light/dark. Search, copy, and print or save as PDF with Page N of M footers. Toggle back to raw text anytime. | ✅ stable |
media-info-wdx | WDX (content) | Shows media metadata in custom columns & tooltips — image/video resolution, audio/video duration, bitrate, codecs, PDF page count, plus an adaptive Summary field. Native ImageIO / AVFoundation / CGPDF; no deps, no network. | ✅ stable |
book-wlx | WLX (lister) | Reads EPUB and FictionBook (FB2) e-books in the viewer (F3) — contents sidebar, continuous reflowable text, cover, reading progress, adjustable text size, light/dark/sepia. Served straight out of the container in-process: nothing unpacked to disk, nothing fetched from the network. | ✅ stable |
image-wlx | WLX (lister) | Views images and PDFs in the viewer (F3) and Quick View with real zoom and pan — pinch, Cmd+scroll, Cmd+= / Cmd+-, drag — and vector-sharp SVG at any zoom. 60+ formats via ImageIO (HEIC, WebP, AVIF, RAW, animated GIF…); continuous PDF scrolling and PDF text selection/copy; pixel size, format and file size in the toolbar. | 🆕 new |
table-wlx | WLX (lister) | Previews CSV/TSV, Excel, Apple Numbers and OpenDocument spreadsheets as a native grid. Select cells or rectangular ranges, copy TSV values, switch worksheets and search. Offline, read-only. | 🆕 new |
More plugins will follow; the repo layout and the contributor guide
are built for that.
What the viewers look like
Press F3 on any .md file and it opens rendered. The built-in viewer's mode
switch still lets you flip to the raw Text view (and back) at any time.
F3 on an .epub, .fb2 or .fbz opens the book itself — contents sidebar,
continuous reflowable text, cover and reading progress — instead of the container.
F3 (or Quick View) on an image opens it fitted to the window, then pinch,
Cmd+scroll or Cmd+= / Cmd+- to zoom and drag to pan. SVG is redrawn as vectors at
every zoom, so a large diagram stays sharp, and pans smoothly, at 1600%. PDFs
scroll continuously with PgUp/PgDn and the same zoom controls. Drag to select PDF
text, Cmd+C to copy it, or Option-drag to pan. Image-only scans require OCR elsewhere.
TableView opens CSV/TSV, Excel, modern single-file Numbers and ODS/FODS files
as a native grid. Select cells, rows, columns or a rectangular range and press
Cmd+C to copy values as TSV. Switch worksheets and search with Cmd+F. It is a
bounded, read-only data preview: formulas use cached results, and charts and
spreadsheet page layouts are not rendered.
Quick start
Requires macOS 11+. Download the bundle for the plugin you want; each release
contains a universal binary, installer and SHA-256 checksum. No Xcode is needed
for these bundles. Unzip, quit Double Commander, then run ./install.sh.
To build from source, install the Xcode command-line tools (xcode-select --install).
Every plugin builds and installs the same way:
cd table-wlx # or image-wlx, book-wlx, markdown-wlx, media-info-wdx
./build.sh # → build/<Plugin>.wlx|wdx (universal: arm64 + x86_64)
# Quit Double Commander first (it rewrites its config on exit), then:
./install.sh # installs to ~/Library/Preferences/doublecmd/ and registers it
Prebuilt bundles that need no Xcode are on the
releases page: unzip,
quit Double Commander, run ./install.sh.
Per-plugin details — supported extensions, how it works, uninstall — live in each
plugin's own README (e.g. book-wlx/README.md).
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
