Lite Explorer

A calm, native-feeling file explorer for your desktop.

Built with Tauri, SvelteKit, and TypeScript.

English · Español

Less chrome. More room for your files.

Lite Explorer is an experimental desktop file browser with a familiar macOS-inspired layout: quick navigation, a focused toolbar, and a roomy content area.

Highlights

Command palette

Press ⌘ ⇧ P and type. One search box finds commands, folders by path, quick-access places, favorites, locations, and recent folders, so you rarely need to reach for the mouse.

Transfer clipboard and Activity drawer

Copy (⌘ C) or cut (⌘ X) files into the transfer clipboard, then paste (⌘ V) them wherever you go next. Every long-running job lands in the Activity drawer: copies, moves, deletes, archive extraction and compression, uploads, and downloads. Filter jobs by All, Active, Done, or Failed, and follow their progress without blocking the window.

Overview

See your disk at a glance: total capacity, free space, mounted volumes, what is using your home folder, and your Trash.

And more

• Tabs and a second pane for side-by-side browsing
• Built-in preview for code, Markdown, CSV, PDF, and images
• Standard or yazi-style keyboard shortcuts
• Collapsible, resizable sidebar with favorites, locations, and tags
• Dark, keyboard-friendly interface

Install on macOS

Download the universal DMG from the latest release, open it, and drag Lite Explorer to the Applications folder.

The current builds use a self-signed certificate and are not notarized by Apple. If macOS blocks the DMG, Control-click it in Finder, choose Open, then choose Open again. Alternatively, remove its quarantine attribute in Terminal:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/path/to/liteexplorer_0.1.5_universal.dmg"

Development

cd apps/desktop

# List available just recipes
just

# Install dependencies
just install

# Run development server
just dev

Stack

Tauri 2 · SvelteKit · TypeScript

Origins

Lite Explorer is an extraction of several tools built before it:

• An interface for connecting to S3 and SMB. Projects like Nicebucket did not save the connections you made, so you had to re-enter them every time. That was the original motivation for saving and reusing connections here.
• A SFTP client, which became the base for the file explorer side.
• A couple of internal tools used in the backoffice at work.

So this was not "vibe-coded". AI was used to port existing code from those previous projects into this one — which, up to that point, was maybe better described as vibe-copied.

The user interface takes inspiration from macOS Finder and Spacedrive.

License

MIT © 2026 Litepod Studio