Panels and navigation

List, icons and thumbnails

Choose List or Icons above each panel. Image files show a thumbnail; other files and folders show a symbol. The Icon size menu offers Very small, Small, Medium, Large and Very large. Changing the view or size keeps the selection and current directory.

In Settings → Panels and files, choose the default view and icon size separately for the left and right panels. You can change the view and size above a panel while working; the size is remembered. The list keeps its usual columns, while the grid places names below the icons.

Moving the cursor

With the mouse: a single click puts the cursor on a row (without selecting it), and a double click works like Enter. Dragging a row onto a folder or into the other panel copies or moves files, and while you drag, the info bar below the panel tells you what will happen when you drop them — Drag and drop.

Opening folders and files

• Enter on a folder opens it.

• Enter on the /.. row, or Backspace, goes to the parent folder. The cursor lands on the folder you just left (you can turn this off in Settings).

• Enter on a file:

  • an archive (.zip, .tar.gz, .7z and others) opens in the panel like a folder — Archives;

  • a file on disk opens in the app the system uses for that file type (e.g. a PDF in Preview or Acrobat);

  • when the system has no app for the file, and also for a file on a server or in an archive, the built-in preview opens.

The path field

Click the field above the list, type a path and press Enter.

• On a local disk, ~ works as the home folder (~/Documents).

• On a server, type the server path (/var/www).

• In an archive, the field shows name.zip!/folder; you can type a path in the same form.

• If the folder can't be opened, the panel stays where it was, and the text you typed stays in the field so you can fix it.

The arrow button next to the field opens the list of recently typed paths. Choosing an entry puts it in the field; the panel goes there when you press Enter. Paths you reached with the keyboard or the mouse don't go on this list.

Directory history

The clock button next to the arrow (Directory history) drops down the list of folders the panel has recently been in — the newest at the top. Clicking an entry takes the panel there right away.

• Each panel has its own history. A panel connected to an FTP/SFTP server shows folders from that server, and once it's back on the disk — local folders again.

• The app remembers folders on the disk after you close it too; a folder that no longer exists won't be on the list.

• You set the length of the list (from 5 to 100, 20 by default) in Settings.

Tip: Save places you use often as favorite paths — you open them with F2.

Quick filter

Start typing in the file list, and the panel shows right away — without Enter — only the names that contain the text you typed. Every further letter narrows the list down, and in the bottom left corner of the panel a small Filter: box shows the text.

• Backspace removes the last letter, Esc clears the filter. Entering another folder clears it too.

• The arrow keys, Enter, selecting and the F keys work as usual all along.

• Copying, moving and deleting apply to what the list shows. A selection hidden by the filter comes back once the filter is cleared.

• Space, *, + and - still select and don't go into the filter. The filter looks for a plain part of the name, without masks such as *.txt.

Drives and volumes

The buttons on the left side of the bar above the panels open a drive in the active panel.

• macOS: the first button is the startup disk (/, e.g. Macintosh HD), followed by the volumes in /Volumes: external disks, USB drives, disk images and mounted network shares.

• Windows: all drive letters (C:, D:…), including network drives.

• Linux (since version 1.5.0): the first button is the root folder /, followed by the disks mounted in /media, /run/media and /mnt — usually USB drives, external disks and memory cards. Up to version 1.4.0 the bar was empty.

On macOS and Windows, after the drives come the buttons of the clouds installed on the computer: iCloud Drive, Google Drive, OneDrive and Dropbox, with a cloud icon and the provider's name. They're ordinary folders synced by the system; files kept only in the cloud download when you copy or open them.

At the end of the bar come the paired computers, if there are any. When the buttons don't fit in the window, the bar scrolls horizontally.

The list refreshes every few seconds, so a USB drive you plug in shows up on its own. The button tooltip shows the name, path and free space.

Ejecting and unmounting

Right-click a drive button. The menu shows what the system allows for that drive:

On a USB drive, an external disk and a memory card, the menu also has Format Volume… — formatting. The internal disk, the clouds and paired computers have no such menu. The same items are in the panel's context menu on a mount point — e.g. on the drive's folder in /Volumes on macOS or in /media/your-name on Linux — and on an empty area of the list in the drive's root folder.

A panel that was on the drive being disconnected first moves one level up (on Windows — to the home folder). Then the window title says “Ejected: …” or “Unmounted: …”, and the drive bar and both panels refresh. When the system refuses (e.g. a file from that drive is open in another app), the Could not disconnect the drive window gives the reason.

Formatting a USB flash drive, an external disk or a memory card

Since version 1.5.0, on macOS, Windows and Linux.

1. Right-click the drive's button on the drive bar (or its mount point in the panel) and choose Format Volume….

2. The Format Volume window gives the name and path of the volume and warns: “Formatting will erase all data on “…”. Other partitions will not be changed.”

3. Choose the File system — the list has only the ones the system can create on this volume — and type a name in the Volume label field. When the system lets you choose the block size, there's also an Allocation unit size field (Automatic by default).

4. Click Format. The app asks once more in the Confirm formatting window; the default button is Cancel.

5. Panels that were showing this volume leave it first. A progress window shows each step and, at the end, the result; the window title says “Formatted: …”.

Warning: Formatting permanently erases all data on the volume. The app formats only the selected volume (partition) — the other partitions of the disk stay unchanged. The item isn't there for the startup disk, a network share, a disc, a disk image, read-only media or media without a partition table (a file system on the whole device); on macOS also not for an encrypted APFS volume.

• macOS: the system tool diskutil does the formatting; the system picks the block size. On an APFS disk, the app erases only the selected volume, and the other volumes in the same container stay — that's why, for an APFS volume, the list offers only APFS of the same variant.

• Windows: the system does the formatting (Format-Volume); Windows asks for permission in a User Account Control window. The allocation unit sizes come from the system for the chosen file system.

• Linux: the UDisks2 service does the formatting (the FlyingFiles packages install it); the system may ask for a password. For ext2, ext3 and ext4 you can choose a 1024, 2048 or 4096 B block when UDisks2 is version 2.10 or later.

Cancel in the progress window works until the system has started writing. After that, the app waits for formatting to finish and reports the actual result. When the cancellation came in time, before writing, the window says “Formatting was stopped. Check the volume before using it again.” — on Linux, the volume may then be left unmounted.

Paired computers

Since version 1.5.0, a computer paired with this one has a button at the end of the drive bar, with a monitor icon and its name (a long name is shortened; the tooltip shows it in full). Clicking it shows its drives in the active panel, and from there you work with them as with a local disk — you copy, move, preview and edit files. That computer must have FlyingFiles running and file sharing turned on (Files of a paired computer). The button of a local drive or of the home folder takes you back to this computer's files. You hide the computer buttons with the Show paired computers on the drive bar field in Settings → Synchronization.

Quick places

The buttons on the right side of the bar show icons only; the tooltip gives the name. They act on the active panel:

Going to a drive, the home folder or a favorite closes an archive open in the panel (saving the changes) and disconnects from the server if the panel was connected to one.

Sorting and columns

The vertical scrollbar stays at the right edge of the panel even when wide columns require horizontal scrolling. This applies to files and to saved server and terminal lists.

• Click a column header to sort by that column; click it again to reverse the order.

• In ascending order, folders come before files. In descending order, the whole order is reversed, so files are at the top.

• A missing date counts as the oldest date.

• To change a column's width, drag the right edge of its header; to change how the window is split between the panels, drag the border between them. The app remembers both.

• You can set each panel's default sort in Settings.

The Size column shows bytes (334561 B); in Settings you can choose kilobytes, megabytes or gigabytes instead. Dates look like YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM. Permissions use the rwxr-xr-x notation; on Windows they are derived from the file attributes (e.g. rw-rw-rw-, or r--r--r-- for a read-only file).

The first row: folder summary

The first row of the list tells you what's in the open folder: on the right it shows the used space (under the Size column) and the number of files and folders (under the Modified column), e.g. “292.97 KB · 24 files, 7 folders”.

• In an ordinary folder this is the /.. row — Enter on it still goes to the parent folder.

• In a root folder, where there's nowhere to go up to, the same row sits at the top of the list with a / sign and is just the summary.

• The row can't be selected. The quick filter doesn't change it — the summary describes the folder, not what the list happens to show.

• By default, only what's directly in the folder counts. You turn on adding up subfolders in Settings, separately for the local disk, network drives and FTP/SFTP. It's counted in the background; until it's done, you see a preliminary total with an ellipsis.

• The summary unit (megabytes by default) is chosen independently of the Size column unit.

Hidden files

View → Show Hidden Files turns hidden files on and off in both panels. Hidden files are files whose names start with a dot and, on Windows, also files with the “hidden” attribute.

Warning: This setting only affects what you see. Copying, moving and deleting a folder always includes the hidden files inside it, and search and statistics see them.

Refreshing

• Cmd+R / Ctrl+R or View → Refresh refreshes both panels. The cursor stays on the same file, and the selection is cleared.

• By default, the app reads a folder again each time you enter it; you can turn this off separately for disks and for servers in Settings — returning to a folder you've visited is then instant, but it may show a slightly outdated state.

• After its own operations (copying, deleting, saving in the editor), the app refreshes the panels by itself. After copying and moving, the destination panel refreshes (the other panel, or the one where you dropped dragged files), and so does every panel that shows the same folder; after moving, also the source panel and every panel that shows the folder the files came from.

• After you drag files to Finder, File Explorer or another app, panels with files on a disk refresh by themselves: right away, after a moment, and for another minute each time the pointer comes back over the FlyingFiles window.

• When you come back to FlyingFiles from another app, panels with files on a disk refresh by themselves, keeping the selection and the cursor.

Warning: FTP/SFTP panels and archives don't refresh by themselves, and a panel doesn't track changes made by another app while the FlyingFiles window is active — refresh it with the shortcut then.

Panel content: files, servers or terminals

Instead of files, a panel can show the list of saved FTP/SFTP servers or SSH/Telnet terminals.

The shortcuts and the menu change the active panel. The icon button in front of the path field opens the same menu for its own panel.

In the list:

• the columns are Name, Protocol, Address and User, and the list's name appears in place of the path field;

• Enter or a double click on a server connects in this panel and shows the server's files; on a terminal, it opens a system terminal window and the panel stays on the list;

• F3 shows information about the entry (protocol, address, user, initial folder or the terminal command) in the same window as the file statistics;

• F4 edits, Shift+F4 adds and F8 deletes an entry (after asking);

• clicking a column header sorts the list, a second click reverses the order and a third restores the order in which entries were added; each panel remembers its own choice;

• the context menu has Connect or Open Terminal, Edit…, Delete…, New Connection… or New Terminal…, New Category…, and Show Files;

• an empty list shows the hint “No saved servers — Shift+F4 adds a server, F7 a category”.

Categories

When the servers or terminals pile up, you can arrange them into categories — they work like folders in the list.

• F7 creates a category (the name must be unique), F4 on a category renames it and F8 deletes it after a confirmation — its entries return to the main list.

• Enter opens a category, and Backspace or the “..” row goes back to the main list.

• An entry moves into a category through the Category field in the edit window (F4) or by dragging it onto the category; dragging it onto “..” returns it to the main list.

• Shift+F4 inside an open category adds the new entry straight into it.

• Categories always stay at the top of the list, whatever the sorting.

File operations (viewing, copying, dropping dragged files, searching, compressing…) don't work in a panel that shows a list. If the other panel shows a list, F5, F6, Compare Directories, Search changes → Copy and syncing with the other panel show the warning “The other panel does not show files”, with the shortcut that switches back to files.

The panel's folder, cursor and selection wait, hidden, behind the list. Going to a drive, the home folder or a favorite path, or connecting from the FTP/SFTP menu, brings the files back. The app always starts with files in both panels.

Disk space

Below the info bar there's a row with a usage bar and text such as “Used 375.0 GB of 500.0 GB (75%) · 125.0 GB free” for the disk that holds the panel's current folder.

• From 90% usage, the bar is red.

• “Used” is the capacity minus the space available to you — the same way Finder and File Explorer count it.

• The row is shown for the computer's disks, mounted network shares and Windows network paths (\\server\share). It isn't shown for FTP/SFTP servers or archives.

• The value refreshes each time you enter a folder, after copying, and every 10 seconds.

• On macOS, next to the free space there is also the purgeable space — “101.4 GB free (+139.0 GB purgeable)” — Time Machine snapshots, caches and iCloud files the system removes on its own when space runs out. Finder and System Settings count it the same way.

• Units are counted by 1024 or by 1000 — your choice in Settings, on the Sizes and summary tab (Settings).

In a folder marked as a disc template and in its subfolders, a second row sits below this one: how much space on the chosen disc the folder's contents already take, e.g. “BD-R 25 GB: 18.2 GB of 23.3 GB (78%) · 5.1 GB free”. When it overflows, its bar is red.

Messages in the window title

Short confirmations (“Created folder: New”, “Connected to SFTP: …”) appear in the window title and disappear after a few seconds. Errors that need your attention appear in a separate window.