Viewing and editing

Viewing — F3

F3 (or View in the context menu) opens the file under the cursor in the preview window. On a folder, nothing happens. Esc or Close closes the window.

The preview also opens when you press Enter on a file the system has no app for, and on any file on a server or in an archive.

The app downloads a file from an FTP/SFTP server first — the Downloading file window shows the progress, the speed and a Cancel button.

The app recognizes the file type by itself:

Text

• Above the text: the encoding, the number of lines and the size.

• The app detects the encoding by itself, trying UTF-8, UTF-16, Windows-1250 and ISO-8859-1 in that order.

• The text is read-only, without line wrapping, in a monospaced font.

• The Find bar below the text: Cmd+F / Ctrl+F moves the cursor into it. As you type, the app highlights the first match, and the counter shows “1 / 12”. Enter or Next goes to the next match (after the last one, it goes back to the beginning), and Previous goes to the one before. Letter case doesn't matter.

Photos

• Above the image: the format, resolution, color depth, alpha channel and file size.

• The image is fitted to the window. The -, 100% and + buttons, and Cmd/Ctrl with +, - and 0, change the zoom (10–800%).

• Transparent areas are shown as a checkerboard.

Browsing with the arrow keys

← and → show the previous and next photo from the same folder, in the panel's order. Files of other types are skipped.

• Round arrow buttons appear on both sides of the photo. They fade out after 5 seconds and come back when you move the mouse over the photo. Clicking one works like the arrow key.

• Browsing stops at the first and the last photo. The Wrap photo and film browsing setting makes the first photo come back after the last one.

• When the folder has only one photo, there are no arrows.

• On a slow disk or with a large file, “Loading…” appears on the photo.

Videos are browsed the same way, but separately: from a photo you go to a photo, from a video to a video. The Browse everything viewable with arrows setting combines photos and videos into one sequence (it takes effect from the next F3). Both settings are in the File preview group.

Videos

FlyingFiles doesn't play videos in its own window. Instead, it shows:

• a frame from the video — on macOS (from the system's Quick Look); on Windows, only the description;

• the resolution and duration of MP4, MOV, M4V and 3GP files — the app reads only a few bytes from the header, so even a multi-gigabyte file opens instantly, including from a server;

• the Open in the system player and Open With buttons, the latter with a list of apps the system associates with the file (if there are none, the list shows “The system knows no application for this file”). Both work for files on the computer's disk.

Hex view

A file that isn't an image, a video or text is shown as a hex dump: the offset, characters and bytes, 16 per row. The preview covers the first 1 MB of the file. The Find bar searches the text of the dump.

Warning: TIFF and HEIC files aren't currently recognized as images — you'll see them as a hex dump. You can open them in the system app with Enter.

Editing — F4

F4 (or Edit in the context menu) opens the file in the edit window. The app downloads a file from a server first, and saving uploads it back to the server. A file in an archive works the same way — the change goes into the archive when you leave it.

An asterisk in the window title and the “Unsaved changes” label mean there are unsaved changes. After you save, the panel refreshes, the cursor moves to the saved file, and “Saved file: …” appears in the main window title.

Warning: Esc and Cancel close the editor without asking about unsaved changes. Save before closing.

Text

• A text editor with a monospaced font, no line wrapping and a Find bar.

• The file is saved in the same encoding it was opened in. If you add a character that encoding doesn't support (e.g. an emoji), saving a Windows-1250 file fails and the app tells you, while in an ISO-8859-1 file the character is saved as “?”.

• Shift+F4 creates a new empty text file and opens it right here.

Images

The image editor has three tabs, with the format and save path choices below them:

Size

• Width and Height (1–20,000 px). With Keep aspect ratio checked, changing one value recalculates the other.

• The new size is applied when you save.

Crop

• X, Y, W and H define the crop area. The area outside it is dimmed.

• Crop crops the image immediately and resets the fields.

Wand and background

• Click the image: the wand selects a contiguous area of similar color (a blue overlay and the pixel count).

• Wand tolerance (0–255, default 24) sets how much the color may differ.

• Remove background makes the selected area transparent. If the chosen format doesn't support transparency, the app switches it to PNG.

• Clear selection removes the selection.

Format and save path

• Format: PNG, JPEG, WEBP or BMP. Changing the format changes the extension in the path.

• Save path is the edited file's path by default. Type a different one to save the result as a new file and keep the original.

• Below that, the app shows the format and resolution it will save the file with. BMP is saved without transparency.

The -, 100% and + buttons, and Cmd/Ctrl with +, -, 0, change the view zoom.

Hex editor

Files that are neither text nor images open in the hex editor — if they are 1 MB or smaller.

• Change the bytes written as pairs of hex digits after the | character. The character column is ignored when saving.

• You can add and remove bytes; below the editor you can see how many bytes will be saved.

• An invalid entry (e.g. 4G) shows a message with the line number, and Save is disabled in the meantime.

Larger files that are neither text nor images open only with a message, and Save is disabled.