SyncCloud
A native macOS app, with a git-style CLI, for comparing, organizing and editing the files you
keep across iCloud Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox and Google Drive.
🌐 Features and screenshots →
SyncCloud has four workspaces:
- Browse — one provider's files, with a Finder-style column view.
- Compare — two folders side by side, showing exactly what differs, with one-click copy, move
and reconcile.
- Organize — file loose documents, find duplicates, fix cloud-hostile names, straighten a
folder tree, and see where the space goes.
- Edit — write Markdown and plain text; read, rework, fill in and sign PDFs.
Deletes go to the Trash, overwrites are staged and swapped in atomically, and each run is a single
⌘Z.
Features
📁 Browse
- Folder sidebar (⌃⌘S) in every workspace: Favorites you curate, Locations for every
signed-in account and disk, and Recents — switchable to Revisited (folders you come back
to) or Frequent (where you spend the most time).
- Column view with an inline preview, per-pane tabs, and a pane bar you arrange
yourself.
🔍 Compare
- Any two providers or folders, with breadcrumbs, back/forward and one-click ⇄ swap.
- Diffs by presence, date and size, with a date tolerance that absorbs cloud timestamp rounding.
- Coded by colour and shape: missing → / ←, changed ↻, and name conflicts ⚠ — names that
differ only by a trailing space or period, a zero-width character, or Unicode form.
- Filter and search (
kind:pdf, >10mb, only:left), with live counts.
- Guided Review steps through each difference — Copy, Move or Skip.
- Content verification checksums same-size pairs to tell you whether they actually differ.
- Keyboard transfers: ⌘→ / ⌘← copy, add ⇧ to move.
🗂️ Organize
One provider, six lenses:
- To File — suggests which existing folder each loose file belongs in, and files it there.
- Duplicates — identical copies, overlapping folders, drifted versions (
Report (1),
Report-final), and PDFs with the same text. Picks a sensible keeper and never trashes the last
copy.
- Renames — names that break on a provider (OneDrive's forbidden characters, Dropbox's trailing
spaces), plus files that break their folder's own date or numbering convention.
- Restructure — finds where a tree disagrees with its own habits (
Form W-2 beside Form W2,
IRS Docs - 2023 beside 2023) and turns it into a plan you review step by step. The undo is
written to disk before anything moves, so it survives a quit.
- Rules — on-device rules ("when a file matches …, file it into
Taxes/{year}") with a dry
run. SyncCloud can learn one from a file you filed by hand.
- Storage — a treemap and ranked lists of the largest, oldest and most reclaimable files.
Read-only: it never moves, deletes or evicts anything.
Optional AI filing. Suggestions come from a fast offline engine. You can add Apple
Intelligence (on-device) or Claude (cloud, opt-in, API key in the Keychain). Claude is used
only when you press Refine with Claude, with a cost estimate first and monthly and lifetime
budget caps ($5 lifetime by default).
✏️ Edit — text and Markdown
- Source, Preview or Split, with a format bar for headings, emphasis, lists, code, links
and tables. Preview can be typed in too (experimental).
- Autosaves a moment after you stop typing, in the file's own encoding; a change made
elsewhere reloads, or asks if you have unsaved edits.
- Markdown helpers: lists continue on Return, pasted links wrap the selection, dropped images
are saved in the note's
Images folder, and tables tidy so their pipes line up.
- Search inside files — switch the file list's filter to Contents to find matching lines,
plus PDFs, Word and PowerPoint files that contain the word.
- Typewriter Scrolling, Readable Line Length, a Paper background, Go to Line (⌃⌘L),
and Expand (⌃⌘E) to hide everything but the text.
- Opens from any pane (⌘O), from File ▸ Open Recent, and from Finder's Open With.
📄 Edit — PDFs
- Read: page thumbnails, the outline when a PDF has two or more bookmarks, single or two-page
layouts, and Find (⌘F).
- Rework: rotate, extract, delete and reorder pages; compress; strip metadata; add or remove a
password. Also on any PDF's right-click menu, for several at once.
- Fill & Sign: text, dates, check marks, and a drawn or typed signature kept on this Mac. Real
form fields fill in their own Tab order and stay fillable. Replace retypes a few words in
their own size, colour and font; the old words stay underneath unless you make that page a
picture.
- Save as PDF turns Word, Excel, PowerPoint, RTF, Markdown and plain-text files into PDFs.
- The original is never modified — every change writes a new file beside it, such as
Lease (signed).pdf.
🧭 Guided setup
A first-run guide reads the folder you point it at — names only, no file is opened — so it can ask
about you and your household with your own folder names in front of you. Nothing is saved until you press
Save. Reopen it from Help ▸ Set Up SyncCloud….
🛟 Safe by design
Atomic, backed-up overwrites; Trash-backed deletes; grouped Undo/Redo and Undo Last Run;
From/To confirmations; collision choices (replace, keep both, skip, or merge folders); and a guard
that refuses an ambiguous path rather than guessing.
🎨 Native macOS
Liquid Glass (Clear, Frosted or Solid), light and dark themes, 11 accent hues, and
Settings ▸ Readability for text size (90–135%) and row spacing.
Screenshots
| Browsing one source | Guided Review | Filing loose files | Finding duplicates |
|---|
| | | |
| Cloud-hostile names | Storage treemap | Reading a PDF | Settings |
|---|
| | | |
Every screenshot is of the app running against a synthetic folder tree.
Requirements
- macOS 26 or later.
- Optional: Apple Intelligence for on-device AI filing; an Anthropic API key for Claude.
- To build: Xcode 26+ (Swift 6) and XcodeGen.
Building
The Xcode project is generated from project.yml:
brew install xcodegen
xcodegen generate
open SyncCloud.xcodeproj # then Build & Run (⌘R)
Command line (synccloud)
Scan and sync without opening the app. Full docs: SyncCloudCLI/README.md.
cd SyncCloudCLI
swift run synccloud providers # list cloud providers
swift run synccloud scan -L iCloud/Documents -R OneDrive/Documents
swift run synccloud scan -L ~/A -R ~/B --json # machine-readable
swift run synccloud sync -L ~/A -R ~/B --direction to-right --strategy keep-both --yes
swift run synccloud restructure # read-only tree report
Key flags: --direction auto|to-right|to-left, --strategy replace|skip|keep-both, --verify,
--fail-fast, --show-hidden, --ignore <path>, --json, --yes. Exit codes: 0 success,
1 partial sync failure, 64 usage error.
Setting up Claude (optional)
- Get an API key from the Anthropic Console.
- In Settings ▸ Intelligence, turn on Use Claude (cloud), paste the key, pick a model
(Haiku 4.5, Sonnet 5 or Opus 5) and press Test.
- Set a monthly or lifetime budget cap.
Without a key, Organize runs on its offline engine.
Project structure
SyncCloud/
├── MacApp/ # SwiftUI app target
├── Modules/ # Swift packages
│ ├── Sync/ # diff engine, file operations, filing, duplicates, storage
│ ├── FileExplorer/ # panes, Compare, Organize lenses, Edit (text and PDF)
│ ├── Dashboard/ # folder sidebar, activity log, details, history
│ ├── Settings/ # settings UI and persistence
│ ├── Design/ # Liquid Glass design system
│ └── Events/ # logging and sync history
├── SyncCloudCLI/ # the synccloud command-line tool
├── SyncCloudTests/ # app-target tests
├── docs/ # feature site (GitHub Pages) and engineering notes
└── project.yml # XcodeGen project definition
Tests run on every push via a self-hosted GitHub Actions runner (docs/ci.md).
What's planned is in ROADMAP.md.
License
Provided as-is for educational and personal use.
