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Changelog

Notable changes, newest first. The format follows Keep a Changelog; versions follow semantic versioning, which before 1.0 means anything may still move.

[Unreleased]

Changed

• The site's navigation folds into a button on a phone. Eight links and a language switcher wrapped into three lines above every page, which is a menu that has eaten the page. Below 48rem they are now behind the three lines everybody recognises, each one a row as tall as a finger; above it nothing has changed. The state is a checkbox and the thing one presses is its label, because there is no JavaScript on this site and a test makes sure there never is. The checkbox is off the screen rather than display: none, so it stays in the tab order and a keyboard can open the menu, and it carries the button's name in each of the seven languages — what is drawn is three lines, what is read out is "Menu".

• The mark, top left, where a reader looks for it. assets/icon.svg beside the name, with no alternative text because the word next to it already says what it is. The same file is now the favicon: that had been logo.svg, which is the 880×236 banner — a browser asked for a tab icon and got a landscape.

[0.27.0] — 2026-10-31

Added

• A good many packages are zips, and Enter now opens them. .jar was already read as one; .war, .ear, .aar, .apk, .aab, .ipa, .whl, .nupkg, .vsix and .xpi are now too — eleven names for the same container, all of them things one opens to see what is inside. A .docx, an .epub and a .cbz are zips as well and are deliberately left off the list: there the program that reads such a file is the more useful answer to Enter, and Shift+F2 unpacks one anyway. The line is about which of the two Enter should mean, not about what can be read. .crx is off the list for a different reason — a Chrome extension is a zip with a Cr24 header in front of it, so it is not one.

• The Unix archive, and the Debian package that is one. .a and .ar open as directories, and so do .deb, .udeb and .ddeb, because a Debian package is an ar: inside it are debian-binary, a control.tar.* and a data.tar.*, and Enter on either tar goes on into it through the nesting that was already there, so the files a package would install are two keystrokes away. The reader is about eighty lines written here rather than a new dependency: sixty ASCII bytes of header per member, no compression anywhere, GNU and BSD long names both, and the / and /SYM64/ symbol tables are not listed as files because they are not files. Reading one entry needs no reading of the ones in front of it, so a member comes out of a large .deb with one seek.

  These two are read and not written, and the distinction is new: the formats now split into the ones this program creates and the ones it only opens. Nothing builds a .a or a .deb by hand any more — ar and dpkg-deb do — and a package written without its control file would look like a package without being one. So the pack dialog offers the writable formats only, and a name like libfoo.a typed into it is refused with a reason, with the dialog still open, rather than starting a job that would fail.

Removed

• The configuration files of the name the program had before 0.5.0. Every one of the four was looked for under its own name and then under an older one, the older one was read and written back to, Config::load began by warning about it, and a test held the whole arrangement in place. It was written for people migrating from a version nobody ran: a kindness to an empty room. A hundred and nineteen lines out of fcmd-config, four public items gone (LEGACY_NAMES, Paths::legacy, and the two helpers behind them), and the discovery order in SPEC 07 §1 is now the three steps it always said it was, with no footnote. Each file is looked for under one name.

Fixed

• A malformed 7z is refused instead of taking the program with it. sevenz-rust2 0.24.2 closes a long list of ways a broken or hostile header could panic, exhaust memory or abort the process outright: a header declaring streams with no files, a block using one stream twice, a chain of coders deep enough to overflow the stack, counts large enough to run past the address space, a file time outside what the platform can hold. Each is an error now. A commander is pointed at files it did not make, so "this archive is broken" has to be something it can say rather than something that happens to it.

Changed

• A drive the other panel is already on opens where that panel is. Alt+F1 on a panel showing C:\ while the other one is on D:\work\src used to land it on D:\, and the work of getting to src had to be done again on a path that was already on the screen. Now the drive row means that directory. Two panels on one disk is how one works on a disk — a tree on one side, a target on the other — and the dialog already knew which panel was where; it just was not saying.

  Four cases where the rule would be a surprise, and so does not fire. The drive a panel is already on still opens at its root: choosing it is how one gets to the top of a disk in one keystroke, and trading that away for a directory one can already see would be a bad bargain. / is not a drive for this purpose — it is a prefix of every path there is, so every other panel is "already on it" and that row would never mean the root again; the dialog's own current-row mark leaves it out for the same reason. A panel on a server, or showing one of the lists under the rule, is not on a drive and lends nothing. And a panel inside an archive lends the directory the archive lives in, rather than a path that would open the archive a second time.

• The FAR inventory was read against the code again, and so was the backlog. docs/04-far-inventory.md is FAR 3.x read from its own repository and compared row by row with what this program does, and its status column said "as of 0.10.0" — sixteen releases ago. Seventeen of its 124 rows had stopped being true: seven are now done (the on-disk tree cache and Alt+F10 over it, the sort-group editor, the code pages menu with its favourites and its own names, auto-save on exit, the wheel with a line count per area and the horizontal wheel, what the viewer remembers per file, and finding a folder in the tree), one that read ✗ is now partly there, and nine more had their "what is left" corrected — among them the attributes dialog, which now changes the owner, and the find dialog, which now searches inside archives.

  Two sentences of its prose contradicted its own first section: it said four view modes where §1 said ten, and it said the per-panel status line was a design choice to revisit "when the command line lands", which it did long ago. And §11, the list of what to build next, was the 0.10.0 plan — all seven of its items have shipped. It is now the list as it stands, in the same order of how much each unlocks.

  The numbers in §1 with it: 110 configuration keys rather than 86, and macros in six scopes rather than five. Two rows of docs/BACKLOG.md went with them, because 0.26.0 built what they were waiting for: chown in the attributes dialog, and copying a hunk across in the diff.

[0.26.0] — 2026-10-30

Added

• The code page the names in a panel are read as. Left / Right → Names code page…, for a tree that came off another machine. A panel starts at as the system gives them, which on Unix means the bytes are taken as UTF-8 — and a directory copied off a Russian Windows, or unpacked from a zip that carried no code page, then draws as a column of replacement characters. Those bytes are a name: in CP866 or CP1251 they say something, and the question marks are ours rather than the filesystem's.

  Only the screen changes. The real path of every row whose name was read differently is kept beside the listing, so opening, copying, renaming and deleting all work on the file the system has while the row says something a person can read. The name is read once, when a listing arrives, so everything downstream — the sort, the filter, the quick search, the drawing — sees the readable name and knows nothing about any of this; which is also why choosing a page reads the directory again. The first row of the list goes back to the system's own answer.

  Unix only, because a name on Windows is already UTF-16 and there are no bytes to read a second way; the menu says that there rather than offering a page that would change nothing. Midnight Commander asks the same question inside the path — #enc:cp866, which is its own VFS — and a list is the same question with the answers in front of the reader, and leaves the path something every other program can still read.

• Taking a difference across, in the diff screen. F5, Midnight Commander's merge key: the column you are in takes the other one's version of the difference at the top of the screen, so Tab chooses which file changes and Alt+↓ chooses which difference. Whole lines move, because a difference is whole lines — a line only the other side has is added, a line only this side has goes, a line both have with different text is replaced — and a line coming out of a Unix file into a DOS one is given DOS line endings, so the result is not a file with one odd line in it. A difference one side has no lines in still has a place to go: where it goes is counted from the rows above it rather than read off a line number it has not got. On a line both files agree about, F5 says there is no difference here rather than taking the next one by surprise.

  Nothing reaches a disk until F2. The file that took something carries a * beside its name, F2 writes it — beside the original and renamed over it, so an interruption leaves what was there whole and the original's mode comes across — and once written the * goes, so a second F2 has nothing to do and says so. Esc with something unwritten says so and leaves at the next press: this screen has no dialog of its own, and a warning one walks past deliberately beats a question one answers twice an hour.

• Who a file belongs to, in the dialog that says what it is. Ctrl+A showed the owner and would not change it. Now Owner is a row, as user:group: either half may be a name or a number — a number because a filesystem with no matching accounts shows one, and typing it back has to mean it — and a half left empty leaves that half alone, so :staff changes the group and nothing else. A row nobody typed in is not a chown at all, which is what keeps a dialog over a hundred files from handing them all to whoever the cursor happened to be on.

  It is the link itself and not what it points at, because the row was read with an lstat and showing one owner while changing another would be answering a question nobody asked. The chown is made before the chmod: a successful one takes the setuid and setgid bits off the file, so the other order would quietly undo an answer just given in the twelve boxes.

  What the system refuses is reported by name. Giving a file away needs a privilege an ordinary account has not got and a group can only be set to one the user is in — neither is worth pretending about, and neither is worth asking for a password over: sudo is one line away in the command line under the panels, where the user can see what it is for. A name no account or group here goes by is said back before anything is called. On Windows the row stays a line to read, where ownership is an entry in a security descriptor rather than a pair of numbers, and over SFTP it is refused, because the names on the other side are the server's to look up.

  While there: something typed into that dialog which is not an answer — that name, or a date that is not a date — now leaves the dialog open with what was typed still in it, rather than closing it and making the reader type the whole thing again.

• Writing text files again: another code page, another line ending. Files → Write again as… takes the selection and writes each file as asked. What they are now is worked out per file — from the byte-order mark where there is one, from what the bytes look like where there is not — because a .txt of nothing but ASCII is every code page at once; the first row of the dialog is there to be told when that guess is wrong. Line endings are left alone, made LF or made CRLF.

  What it refuses, it refuses by name: a file that does not look like text, a file over 64 MB (decoding reads the whole of it), and a target page that cannot hold every character in the file — rather than writing one full of question marks. A file that would come out exactly as it went in is not written at all, because that would change its modification time and tell every backup in the house it had changed. The new text goes beside the original and is renamed over it, so an interruption leaves the original whole, and the original's mode is carried across so a script that was executable stays executable.

• Learn keys: which keys this terminal actually sends. Options → Learn keys draws a cell for every key worth testing — the function keys with each modifier, the arrows with Ctrl and Shift, the editing keys — and lights it when that key arrives. A cell that never lights is a key the terminal is not sending at all, which no binding can conjure; the line underneath names the last key that did arrive and what it is bound to here, which is how one tells "the terminal swallowed it" from "it arrived and does nothing". Two Esc leave, because one Esc is a key under test like any other.

  Midnight Commander, where this comes from, goes on to let one type in the escape sequence a key should have sent. This does not, and the reason is in the row of the feature table: the sequences are read by a library with a table for the terminals in use, which is better at it than anything typed in by hand — so what is missing here is missing from the terminal, and the answer is a different key rather than a different table.

• The viewer can read a command instead of the file: Midnight Commander's filtered view. Shift+F5 asks for a command, hands it the file, and shows what it printed — strings, xxd, pdftotext, objdump -d, jq ., a script of one's own. A [[decompile]] rule did this already for the formats somebody had written a rule for; this is the same screen with the tool named by hand, which is the answer for every format nobody has. The line is run by the shell, so a pipe works; the file goes at the end of it unless the line already names it (!.! says where); and Backspace goes back to the file itself.

• A command can fill the panel: Midnight Commander's external panelize. Commands → Panelize a command's output asks for a command line, runs it where the panel is, and takes every line it prints as the name of a file — find . -newer Makefile, git ls-files, grep -rl TODO .. What comes back is the temporary panel that already existed, so F5, F6, F8 and the selection keys work on it as on any other list. A relative name is resolved against the panel, a line naming something that is not there is left out rather than drawn as a row that cannot be opened, and the status line says how many were left out — a command whose every line was dropped was printing something other than file names. A failing exit status does not throw the list away: a find that could not read one directory out of fifty has still found the other forty-nine.

• One shell, kept, behind the command line. The command line ran each command in a child of its own, which is why typing cd .. into it did nothing a person could see: the child changed its own directory and died with it, and so did an export, a shell function, a TMPDIR set once. Midnight Commander answered this in the eighties by keeping one shell alive behind the panels and writing the typed line into it; this is that, and it is the thing an mc user would have missed first.

  The line goes in as it was typed — there is no second shell in between, so an alias, a * and a $HOME mean what that shell says they mean — and what a command does outlives it. The directory travels both ways: a cd in the shell moves the panel, and moving the panel takes the shell along, so the next command runs where you are looking. Ctrl+C on the output screen sends the interrupt to whatever is running there.

  How the shell is asked is the mechanism terminals already use: it is sent a prompt hook when it starts, and what the hook emits is OSC 133;C before a command, OSC 133;D;<status> when one ends, and OSC 7 for the directory — so a shell whose own configuration emits them is understood without being asked twice. There is a hook for bash, zsh, fish and for a plain POSIX sh, which has no hook before a command but does expand its prompt afresh every time it draws one. cmd.exe has none at all and keeps a child per command: half a session, where cd works and the exit status never arrives, would be worse than none. [term] subshell turns it off, [term] follow_cwd turns off only the following.

  None of the hooks puts the directory in the prompt. A prompt belongs to the shell's line editor, which measures its width to know where the cursor is and counts an escape sequence it was not told to ignore as letters on the screen; a prompt it measures wrongly it redraws wrongly, repeating the character that lands in the last column. In a path that is a letter that was never there, and the panel would follow a directory nobody has. So the marks are printed to the terminal and the prompt is left empty.

  What the shell prints is read as lines rather than into a grid (fcmd_term::Transcript), because the screen Ctrl+O opens is a line buffer: a progress bar rewriting itself with a carriage return stays one line, and the prompt and the echo of the command are left out, so the heading that screen writes for the command is not printed twice underneath it.

Changed

• The feature table was read against the code again. docs/02-features.md is the map of everything the commanders of the world do and where each idea came from, and its State column had drifted: thirty of the thirty-six rows that said "the milestone in progress owns this, and it is not there" were wrong. Twelve were finished long ago and nobody changed the character — the hex and dump modes, go-to and the bookmarks, streaming and follow mode, the next file from inside the viewer, raw devices, the per-mode view flags, apply-a-command, the temporary panel, the selection matrix, the mask grammar, the seven languages, and what is remembered per file. Eighteen more had most of the work done, and the cell now names what is left rather than implying none of it exists. Six still say M2 and mean it: a stacked layout, the branch view, icons, the multi-rename tool, a disk-usage view, and opening the item in the desktop's own file manager.

  A map that says a road is missing when it is there is worse than no map, because it is the thing one plans from. This is a reading job rather than a writing one and it had never been done in one pass; the legend now says when it was.

[0.25.0] — 2026-10-30

Added

• Writing into an archive that is inside another archive. Every reader here reads a file, so a container inside a container is read from a copy of itself on this disk — and until now that copy was the end of the road: a write into it was refused, because rebuilding the copy would change a file that is thrown away when the program ends and claim the archive had changed. It is now not the end of the road but the first step of it. The copy is rebuilt, and then the rebuilt copy is put back into the archive it was taken out of, which may itself be a copy — so it goes on outwards until the file on the disk, which is the one that really changes. Three zips deep is three rebuilds, each atomic in itself, so an interruption leaves an outer archive still holding the old inner one rather than a broken archive. The container cache is dropped at every level, and the copies are stale the moment the file at the bottom of the chain is rewritten, so the next listing reads what was just written. An archive on a server is still read-only and still says so: its copy could be written, but nothing would carry it back.

• The help says which version is talking, and who wrote it. The chapter that explains what the program is now opens on a line of its own — FinalCommander <version> — by Matteo Baccan — with the version the binary really is, in the language the program is running in. The version is read out of the binary rather than written into the page, so a release cannot leave it behind, and the byline is on that one chapter rather than at the top of every page of the help.

Fixed

• A file copied into an archive inside an archive went into the wrong archive. Open a zip, put a zip inside it, step into that one and put a third zip inside it: nothing appeared. The write had been applied to the outer archive, at the path the inner one would have used, without a word. What a path inside an archive is in used to climb out to the file on the disk while the path inside stayed the innermost container's, so the two halves of the answer belonged to two different archives. The same pairing was behind a deletion two containers deep looking for the name in the outer archive — and taking a file of that name out of it if one was there — and behind a rename failing with the archive complaining that what it had just written was not in it. It is now the innermost container: the archive the panel is actually standing in.

• A link inside the site no longer takes the reader out of their own language. The table that says which repository document became which page named one page per document — docs/help/files.md → help/files.html — while the pages themselves are one per document per language: help/files.html is the English chapter and help/files.it.html the Italian one. So every cross-document link on a translated page landed on the English page, and following a link inside one's own site was a way out of it. The table is now built per language, and a test walks every translated page and fails on any link that leaves its language — the switcher excepted, which is the one place allowed to.

  The changelog and the survey of the other commanders were the louder half of the same thing: they existed once, in English, so their navigation was English too and reaching them turned the whole site English. Their text is still the English document, with the line in the reader's language saying so, but the page around it is now theirs — as the help chapters have been since they were translated one at a time.

Changed

• The site has no download page, and names no version anywhere. The page listed the archives of whichever version it was generated from, so it was wrong the day after a release and made every release a reason to publish the site again. Download the latest version now leads to the releases page, which is always the latest one, and the version is gone from the footer too. Nothing on the site goes stale when a release is cut: what is published are the repository's documents, and they change when they change.

• The README no longer names a version, and says plainly what the project wants. Its status line read Status: 0.10.0, fourteen releases ago, and listed image previews among what was missing — they shipped in 0.22.0. A version written in prose is a second copy of the release badge that sits two inches above it, so it is gone rather than corrected: the badge is the version. What the line says instead is the one thing this repository asks for — "I do not need your code. I need your ideas: open an issue with your idea and it goes into the next release." The section that explains why it is that way round was already there and is unchanged.

• The site's landing page asks for it too, in all seven languages, beside the download button where somebody who read that far will see it, with a link into the issue chooser. The site had no such sentence anywhere: the message reached whoever read the README on GitHub and nobody who arrived at the page.

[0.24.0] — 2026-10-30

Added

• The best answer appears while one types, and the list can have FAR's manners (SPEC 06 §7.4). Two settings under [cmdline.complete]:

  • append — hint by default: the rest of the best answer is drawn after the caret in a dim colour and is not in the line, so Enter still runs what was typed, and → or End takes it. line is FAR's own, where it goes into the line marked out so the next character replaces it and Enter runs it with the offer attached; off is neither. Nothing is appended unless the caret is at the end of the line, the answer continues what is typed without changing it, and the answer's own caret is at its end — so Cargo.toml, which is offered for car because a completion that minded the case would be one nobody uses, is in the list but not after the caret: the line would read cargo.toml and one would get Cargo.toml. Tab takes that one.
  • modal — off by default. FAR's list owns Enter the moment it appears; ours waits until somebody has walked into it, because a list that stole Enter would make typing feel like a trap. true asks for FAR's manners.

  Every theme gained cmdline.hint.fg, which is the dim of its own palette.

• The information panel says what the directory is sitting on, and what its repository is doing (Ctrl+L, SPEC 02 §9). Two lines that were the other half of where am I:

  • the filesystem and the mount: ext4 (rw,noatime) and /dev/vda1 on /. Linux keeps the whole table in /proc/self/mountinfo, so it is read with no call at all and the deepest mount point that covers the path wins — which is what makes a bind mount inside another answer for itself. macOS answers statfs, and its flags are reported in Linux's spelling so that nobody has to learn two vocabularies. Windows has no mount options; what it has is the filesystem's name, which the drives dialog already asks for. ro and noexec are the two words that explain most of the refusals a panel can produce.
  • the git repository: main · 3a7f2e1 · 3 of 42 differ from the index, with a merge or a rebase halfway through named as such. Nothing is run — git need not even be installed — and nothing is hashed: the branch, the commit and the state are small files, and the count is one stat per tracked file against what the index recorded. Which is why the line says differ from the index and not modified: a file that was touched, or rewritten with the same bytes, is counted here, and telling those apart is what hashing is for. An index larger than twenty thousand files, or in a version this reader does not know, says not counted rather than guessing. Untracked files are not looked for, because that means walking the tree and reading every .gitignore on the way down.

  Neither is read unless a panel is showing it: the request for a listing now says whether anything on screen is asking, and a panel of files asks for none of this. The prompt's own %gitbranch% moved onto the same reader, so there is one walk upwards in the program rather than two.

• FAR's precision suffix on a column width (SPEC 02 §3b). Column widths may carry a +n after a number — 8+2 — which is not width but precision, and importing a FAR mode dropped it without saying so. FAR counts precision where we spell a format, so this is where the one becomes the other: on a time column +1 arrives as %I:%M %p, +2 as %H:%M:%S and +3 as %H:%M:%S%.3f; a date-and-time column keeps its date and lengthens only the clock; and +2 on a date on its own asks for the four digits of the year, which ours writes in any case, so there is nothing to change and nothing to report. A precision on a column that has none — a size, a name — is reported, like every other part of a FAR mode we cannot honour.

[0.23.0] — 2026-10-30

Added

• F11 reads a video, a sound and a PDF, not only a program (SPEC 05 §1.8). The structure pane existed because a binary is a tree of records with a length on each; so are the files people actually keep in a folder, and they raise the same question — what is this, and where inside it is anything.

  • ISO base media — MP4, MOV, M4A, M4V, 3GP, HEIF: the brands, the duration, every track with its codec, its resolution or its sample rate and its language, the tags an audio player writes into an .m4a, and the boxes as rows Enter follows. A film is three gigabytes of mdat and this reads sixteen bytes per box plus the moov. A .mov from before ftyp existed is recognised by the box it opens with.
  • Matroska — MKV, WebM, MKA: the DocType, the TimecodeScale and Duration, the title and the writing application, every TrackEntry, and the segment's children as navigation, with the clusters listed once and then counted because a film has tens of thousands. An element of unknown length — a stream still being written — stops the walk at that level rather than at the file.
  • RIFF — AVI, WAVE, WebP: AVI's main header and a group per stream, with the codec taken from the format chunk because strh's handler is zero in half the files ever written; WAVE's format and how long its data plays; WebP's canvas, which is the one picture size our own decoder cannot give.
  • PDF: the version, the page count, the first page's paper in points, millimetres and by name, the /Info fields, what /Encrypt allows, how many times the file has been saved since it was written — and the pages themselves, each row going to its object. The index of a PDF is at the end and, since 1.5, is itself a deflated object whose catalogue lives inside object streams, so this follows startxref, reads the classic table or the stream, and inflates what it must, undoing the PNG predictor. An index that leads nowhere is not an error: the file is read for N G obj and that is believed instead, which is what a truncated download or a hand-edited file needs. An object packed into a stream sends Enter to the stream that holds it, because that is where its bytes are, and an encrypted file's strings are shown as (encrypted) rather than as the ciphertext they hold.

  Neither reader decodes a frame or pulls out a page's text: the first wants a video codec, which means a C library and a licence this project has refused, and the second wants the content stream's operators and a font's ToUnicode map. Both already have an honest answer in a [[decompile]] rule with ffprobe or pdftotext on Shift+F6.

Fixed

• The keys that change a binary's length are tested now. Ins has chosen between inserting and overwriting in the hex editor since it was written, Backspace takes out the byte before the cursor while inserting and steps back while overwriting, Del takes out the one under it, and the header says ins or ovr — all of it was there, and none of it was covered by a test: the editor's own tests exercise the model, which cannot tell whether a key reaches it. That is precisely how the wastebasket went missing on a server earlier in this cycle. Two tests now press the keys and read the header.

• A table's columns stay where the heading says they are. A cell holding a newline — a CSV field between quotes, a JSON string somebody wrote as a paragraph — slid every column to its right one place left, on that row and on no other. The two halves of the program disagreed about a control character: UnicodeWidthStr::width counts one as a column while the screen buffer skips it and draws none, so the cell was measured a column wider than it appeared. A cell is flattened to one line before it is measured or drawn now, with each control character replaced by a space rather than dropped — Attività: and a list beneath it read as Attività: - Eseguire instead of running together — and the two measures cannot disagree because there is nothing left to disagree about.

• The quick view shows a picture. Ctrl+Q beside a .png left an empty frame: a picture has no rows of text, and only the viewer's own window knew to paint one. Both windows paint it the same way now. The quick view decodes at most eight mebibytes, because it draws whatever the cursor is standing on and the decoding runs on the thread that draws — a directory of photographs would otherwise make every arrow key feel stuck. Anything larger waits for the F3 one presses on purpose.

[0.22.0] — 2026-10-30

Added

• A picture is shown as the picture (SPEC 05 §1.14). F3 on a .png, .jpg, .gif or .bmp draws it, and F4's wheel goes on to the dump and the hex for the times one came for the bytes instead.

  It is drawn in half blocks: a terminal cell is about twice as tall as it is wide, so a cell holding ▀ with the top half in the foreground colour and the bottom in the background is two pixels that are each very nearly square, and a window is a canvas twice as tall in pixels as it is in rows. It is coarse and it works in every terminal there is, which is why it comes before kitty's, iTerm2's and sixel's protocols rather than after them — a picture one cannot see at all is worse than one made of blocks, and nothing below the drawing has to change when the protocols arrive.

  The file's first bytes decide, never its name. A photograph is fitted to the window keeping its shape; a sixteen-pixel icon is left at its own size rather than blown up into coloured squares. The scaling averages the pixels it covers, so the text in a screenshot stays legible. What is transparent shows the viewer's own background through it. Nothing scrolls, because the picture is already the size of the window, and a file that is damaged, too large or not a picture says so rather than leaving a blank screen.

• Base64, undone (SPEC 05 §1.13). Alt+B in the viewer decodes a file that is base64 and shows what came out, keeping the path in the title. A certificate, a key, an attachment pulled out of a mail, a data: URI pasted into a file: all of them are bytes written down in sixty-four printable characters, and all of them are unreadable until something undoes that.

  The bytes decide how they are drawn — text when they read as text, the hex pane when they do not, which is the usual case — and the status line says how many came out, because that figure is how one knows the decode was the right one. Three shapes are read: the bare payload (wrapped or not, padded or not), PEM armour with its -----BEGIN …----- lines skipped, and a data: URI with its label taken off. Both alphabets work, the standard one and the URL-safe one a token uses.

  A file that is only mostly base64 is refused, with the byte that stopped it and where it is: decoding as far as the first bad character would hand back bytes nobody wrote. It is the one view that replaces the file rather than drawing it another way, so the key does not toggle — Esc and opening the file again are the way back, as they are from a disassembly.

Fixed

• The quick search is drawn in its own panel's foot (SPEC 02 §6). Alt+a letter opened a box in the middle of the screen, over the rows one had started the search to read. It stands on the panel's own bottom frame now, two columns in from its left edge, which is where FAR draws it: the rows it covers are the last of the list, the ones already walked past. A panel too small to hold it still gets the box in the middle, which is at least somewhere it fits.

• Deleting the file under the cursor no longer throws the cursor to the top. The panel looks for the name it was on and, not finding it, fell back to row zero — .., the whole list away from where one was working. It keeps the row instead, so the cursor lands on whatever took the deleted file's place, and on the new last row when the last one went.

Added

• CRC32, written as a .sfv (SPEC 03 §9). The fourth entry in the checksum dialog, and the one that is not a hash: two files with the same CRC32 are easy to make on purpose, so it answers did this arrive intact and nothing else, which is the question a .sfv asks.

  A list of them is written in the .sfv shape and never in the other one — name hex8, the digest at the end of the line, ; for a comment, eight hex characters zero-padded, and file.sfv beside a single file — because nothing reads a .sfv written as <hex> <name>. Reading is the same either way: a digest of eight characters says CRC32 as one of 64 says SHA-256, so a .sfv somebody sends is checked like any other list, and a name with a space in it still works because the digest is taken off the end rather than the name off the front.

• Where a descript.ion lives, and in what code page (SPEC 02 §13). Two settings of FAR's: panel.description_names is the list of names looked for, in order, with the first the one a new file is written under — a tree full of files.bbs no longer grows a second file beside each one — and panel.description_utf8 = false writes the file back in the code page it was read in, for a side file shared with the DOS-era tools that cannot read anything else.

  The page is the file's own and never this machine's: guessing the local one would turn a Russian descript.ion into a Latin one on a Latin machine. A file that is not there yet, one that was already UTF-8, and one whose page cannot hold what was typed are all written in UTF-8 anyway — an encoder writes a ? for what it has no room for, and a file a DOS tool cannot read is better than a line that lost its words.

• The switches beside the columns, per view mode (SPEC 02 §3b). A [[column_set]] block now carries what the rest of FAR's panel-mode dialog carries: fullscreen, align_extensions, align_folder_extensions, folders_upper, files_lower and upper_to_lower. They belong to the mode rather than to the program, which is the point of them — one view of one's own draws the names with the extensions lined up in a column, another draws directories in capitals to tell them apart without colour, and the digit chooses between them.

  Each left out is what the panel drew before they existed — the extensions of files lined up, and nothing else — so a block that says nothing looks as it always did. fullscreen is Ctrl+F1 applied by the mode: choosing it hides the other panel, leaving it gives the screen back, and a panel hidden by the key itself is left alone, because a mode undoing somebody's own keypress would be the mode reaching outside itself. upper_to_lower is FAR's switch for the 8.3 names a FAT volume hands back; a name with no letters in it is not "all capitals", so README changes and 2026 does not.

[0.21.0] — 2026-10-29

Added

• A server reached through another one (SPEC 04 §6.3). A session has a Jump host field on its SFTP page — bastion, gate@bastion, gate@bastion:2222, an address in brackets — and that is ssh -J: a session on the bastion, a direct-tcpip channel from it to the destination, and the destination's own SSH session inside that channel. The bastion carries a stream it cannot read, so the key exchange, the authentication and the files are between this program and the server behind it, which is the whole reason to prefer this to forwarding an agent.

  Each machine's host key is checked under its own name, so a first connection can ask twice — saying yes to the bastion is not saying yes to what is behind it. The bastion is authenticated with the agent or with the session's own key file, never with the destination's password: a password typed for one machine is not sent to another, and the error says so when there is no agent to fall back on. SFTP only, because FTP and WebDAV have nothing to build a tunnel out of, and a jump written on one of those is refused with a sentence rather than ignored. One hop, not a chain.

• A table sorts and filters, and still writes nothing (SPEC 05 §1.11). Ctrl+F3 sorts the rows by the column the view is on — the one Ctrl+←/Ctrl+→ walks to — ascending, then the other way round, then back to the order the records are in the file, because a sort with no third press is a sort with no way out. Ctrl+F7 asks what a row has to hold and keeps only those; an empty answer gives them all back. Ctrl+F3 is the key that sorts in the panels and Ctrl+F7 the other thing one does with what F7 looks for.

  Both are an index and nothing else: one record number per visible row, built from the records and thrown away to go back. Nothing is written, and every row keeps its own offset, so a search, a bookmark and Alt+F8 still mean the record rather than its place in the sorted list. A column whose every cell reads as a number sorts as numbers — a column of sizes does not put 1000 before 9 — and 1,20 is read as a price while 1,200 is a thousand and two hundred. The status line says what the view is doing (↑name, ↓size, /tor), and says out loud when a sorted table is only as much of the file as the mode read. Above 200 000 records both refuse and say so: a table that large is one to query rather than to sort in a viewer.

  Editing a cell stays out, which was the question this row had been waiting on. A viewer that writes is an editor, and F4 and the hex pane are where writing lives; a cell written back would be a line rewritten for CSV, fixed-length records and a memo file beside them for DBF, and nothing honest at all for a file read only as far as the limit.

• A drop on the other panel opens the copy dialog (SPEC 02 §12). The third of the three mouse drags, and the one that was held back as a question: what a drop means. It means the dialog F5 opens, with the destination the pointer chose — the directory under it, or that panel's own when the row is a file, because a file is not somewhere to copy into — acting on what the sweep selected on the way over, or on the row the press landed on.

  It copies nothing by itself. The gesture is imprecise by nature and starts by accident, so what answers for it is the dialog that was already there: the conflict policy, the filter, what travels with the file, and the Esc every dialog has. The Explorer's rule — a drag within one drive moves, a drag across drives copies — is the other way this could have gone: the same gesture doing two different things depending on where the files are, one of which deletes the original. It has surprised people for thirty years; FAR asks instead, and so does this.

Fixed

• F8 reaches the system's wastebasket again. Every job in the program runs through the routed filesystem — local paths to the local provider, remote paths to their connection — and that layer implemented the methods a server needs and left the rest to the trait's own refusals. A method it did not route was therefore a method the program had not got, and trash was one: deleting a local file with the wastebasket on answered there is no wastebasket here, which is the sentence meant for a server, on a disk that has one. Six methods were in that state and all six are routed now — the wastebasket, appending to a file, hard links, reading a file a chunk at a time (which is what a checksum does), the wipe and the search-and-replace in a file — so a local path arrives where it always should have. A server still refuses each of them, and now says it is a server that does.

• An error box says the path once. Nearly every error the engine raises already begins with the path it is about, and the box had just drawn that path on a line of its own: the name appeared twice, and three times when the hint about Shift+Del added it again. The duplicate prefix is stripped and the hint is a sentence rather than a line about a file.

• The dialog's key bar keeps its twelve boxes. Under a modifier a dialog answers nothing at all, and an empty list of labels does not mean an empty row: it takes the row off the screen altogether. The blank bar is twelve numbered boxes with nothing written in them now, which is what FAR's own dialog bar looks like — and what keeps F5 the fifth box along wherever one is standing (SPEC 02 §12).

[0.20.0] — 2026-10-29

Added

• A dialog has its own bottom row, and F1 in one works (SPEC 10 §3). FAR changes the key bar inside a dialog, and for the same reason the panels' bar changes with the modifier: the panels' keys are not on the screen, so a row still offering Copy and MkFold over a copy dialog is describing something that is not there. The row says only what the dialog answers — F1 the help, F10 OK, under Ctrl the F5 that moves it, under Alt the F10 that opens the copy dialog's folder list — and a list says F4 where its rows can be edited, F9 in the drive dialog, and F10 as the way out rather than as an answer. It is short, and that is the honest length of it: a dialog is answered with Enter and Esc, and inventing function keys to fill the row out would be worse than leaving it empty.

  Writing Help there turned up something quieter: F1 in a dialog did nothing at all, and the page it should have opened — This dialog — had been in the help since the help was written, reachable from nowhere. It opens now, with the dialog parked behind it and everything typed into it still there, and what the dialog was itself opened over — a file being read, a file being edited — stays parked under it. The help's own pages have a section on dialogs to follow it into, in both languages.

• NE, LE/LX and TE in the structure pane (SPEC 05 §1.8). Three families the pane met and called MZ: the 16-bit New Executable of Windows 1.0 to 3.11 and OS/2 1.x, the Linear Executables of OS/2 2.0 and of the DOS extenders and Windows 9x VxDs, and the Terse Executable that UEFI firmware is built out of — which has no MZ in front of it at all, because it is a PE with the stub and most of the headers cut off, so VZ is what is left to recognise. Nothing current produces any of them; people read them, which is what this pane is for.

  Each gets its header decoded field by field and the one table that says where the file's contents are. An NE's segment table is the one place in these families where a file offset falls out of the header arithmetic — a sector number shifted by ne_align — so those rows are what Enter follows. An LX or LE object is reached through a page table that is laid out one way in LX and another in LE, so the objects carry their sizes and permissions and the tables are what Enter follows: a page decoded against the wrong one of the two layouts would send a reader to a plausible wrong place, which is worse than sending them to the table and letting them look. A TE's sections do get offsets, because StrippedSize is the whole of the arithmetic — the section headers still carry the offsets the PE had — and the mapping from a virtual address follows the same sum, so va: in the viewer works there too.

  What none of the three gets is the equivalent of the PE reader's import and export walks: those want a second format each, and nothing here can be tested against a real file of them. There is no separate TE64 either: the header always carries a 64-bit image base, and Machine is what says x86-64 from IA-32.

• Two of the three mouse drags (SPEC 02 §12). A drag from a row selects every row it sweeps, in the panel the press began in, and leaves the cursor where it stopped; a drag on the frame where the two panels meet moves the rule between them, within the same limits Ctrl+← and Ctrl+→ keep, so the two ways of moving it cannot disagree about how narrow a panel may get. Which of the two a drag is was decided when the button went down, so one gesture cannot turn into the other halfway, and a press on the frame alone does nothing — a click on a frame never did, and a press that moved the split would be a trap.

  The sweep only ever selects. A drag that overshoots and comes back leaves what it passed over selected, which is the right way round for a gesture nobody aims precisely: the right button takes one row out again and Gray * turns the lot round, while unselecting on the way back would mean remembering the selection the drag started from — and a selection the mouse quietly threw away is worse than one row too many.

  The third drag, a selection dropped on the other panel, is left on purpose: what a drop means is a question rather than a gap. The Explorer moves within a drive and copies across one, a rule that has surprised people for thirty years; FAR asks instead. Until that is answered a drop would be a destructive operation started by a slip of the hand, and F5 with two panels open is already the short way to do it.

• Alt+F10 picks a path for the row that asks for one (SPEC 10 §3). The copy dialog's destination could be chosen from the folder tree; a row that names a file — the key file of a stored connection — was typed by hand, and the backlog had wanted a ... button opening a panel inside the dialog for it. It is one key and two lists instead: the tree of folders for a row that wants a folder, which the extraction dialog's destination now gets as well, and one directory at a time for a row that wants a file.

  The file list is a list like every other choice in this program, so it filters as you type like the rest of them: .. above, the directories next, the files after them, Enter on a directory walking into it rather than answering — so a list of one directory reaches the whole filesystem — and Esc leaving the row exactly as it was. Everything in the directory is listed, hidden names included, because ~/.ssh is exactly where the key file this was written for lives. Local only, for the reason the folder list is local only: a listing per keystroke over the wire is not a dialog, and a path on a server is typed with Tab to complete it. The key bar under Alt says which of the two the row would open.

• Round boxes, where one answer excludes the others (SPEC 10 §3). A row that cycles its values in place is right for a long list — thirty code pages do not belong on the screen at once — and wrong for a short one: overwrite / skip / rename are three answers to one question, and a reader who cannot see the other two has to press a key to find out what they are. So there is a (•) row now, each row of a group carrying the same configuration key and the value it stands for, Space or → picking the one under the cursor and putting the rest of the group out. Round where a box that stands on its own is square, so the shape says which it is before the label is read.

  The copy dialog's what if it is already there is the first group: six boxes instead of one row that cycles through six values, because rename and append are the two nobody finds by pressing → hopefully.

• Ctrl+F5 moves a dialog (SPEC 10 §3). FAR's own key, for FAR's own reason: a dialog covers the thing it is about — the file under the cursor, the panel one is copying from — and sometimes that is the one thing one needs to read. The arrows push it about while it is moving, Enter and Esc only stop moving it (neither answers nor closes it, because a key that threw the dialog away while one was pushing it about would be a trap), and where it was pushed to is forgotten when it closes, so the next one opens where it belongs. It is clamped to the screen rather than pushed off it.

• Tab completes a path in a dialog (SPEC 10 §3). The destination of a copy is typed far more often than it is chosen from a tree, and /usr/lo is most of /usr/local/: Tab on a row that names a path now finishes it the way a shell does. One match is written out whole — with its separator when it is a directory, so the next Tab goes inside it — several are taken as far as they agree and the status line says how many there were.

  Where there is nothing to add, Tab moves on through the dialog as it always did, so the key never stops working; and it reads one directory, the one the half-typed path names, because a dialog's Tab should not start a walk. The rows that complete are the ones that name a path: a copy's destination, an extraction's folder, an archive's name, a key file. A mask or a colour is not a path, and a Tab that tried to complete one against the filesystem would be a Tab that does nothing where it used to do something.

Changed

• Tab walks the whole dialog (SPEC 10 §3). It went to the buttons and stayed among them: somebody who had tabbed as far as Cancel to read it had no way back to the field they wanted to correct except an arrow key they had no reason to try. Now the ring is the rows of the page that is open, then the buttons, then the first row again, with Shift+Tab the other way round — which is why one key out of the first row is the last button, the way out. On a row that names a path Tab still completes it first, and only moves on when there is nothing left to add.

[0.19.0] — 2026-10-29

Added

• Every list filters as you type (SPEC 10 §2b). Four of them did — the folders and the three histories — and the rest were read by scrolling, which with thirty-odd code pages or four hundred plugin commands is slower than typing part of what you want. All of them do now, and three details make it a feature rather than a change of key:

  Esc clears what was typed before it closes the list, and a second Esc closes it: throwing away the list and the cursor's place in it to get out of a filter is a key that does too much. Where the rows have keys of their own — the drive dialog's letters, a user menu's digits — the letters stay theirs and Alt and a letter is the filter, because those keys are what somebody who uses them twice a day presses. And typing comes after every key a list has of its own, so Space in the settings browser still flips the setting.

  With it, Alt+←/→ slides the rows sideways and Alt+Home puts them back: a folder history of deep paths is wider than its box, and eliding the middle of every line is not the same as being able to read the end of one.

• The wheel is as many rows as you say, per area, and the sideways wheel works (SPEC 02 §12). Three rows a notch was a constant; it is three settings now, as it is in FAR, because a notch that is right for a file listing is too much in a page of prose: ui.wheel_lines for the panels and the lists, ui.wheel_lines_viewer, ui.wheel_lines_editor. Three by default and never more than twenty, because a number nobody should be able to set is clamped rather than trusted.

  The sideways wheel — a trackpad has one, a mouse often does not — scrolls what has anything to scroll sideways, by as many columns as the wheel moves rows: a long line in the viewer, a long line in the editor. Over a panel it does nothing, and that is the right answer rather than a gap: a panel's columns are a layout, not a window onto something wider, so there is nothing there to move.

  It also fixes something quieter. The wheel and the click inside the viewer and the editor had nothing to hit: the areas they are drawn in were never recorded, so a notch over a file being read did nothing at all whatever the documentation said. They are recorded now — after the scrollbar and the structure pane have taken their columns, so a notch over the pane is not a notch over the text.

• Raw devices on Windows (SPEC 05 §1.10). F3 and F4 on /dev/sdb have worked since 0.0.8 because on Linux and macOS a disk is a file; on Windows it is not, in three separate ways, and the backlog had carried all three. They are done:

  The name: there is no /dev, so a disk is \\.\PhysicalDrive0 and a volume \\.\C:, names the filesystem does not list and which are therefore typed rather than arrived at from a panel. The length: metadata on such a name fails — it asks the filesystem about something that is not in it — and seeking to the end answers nothing, so the device is asked (IOCTL_DISK_GET_LENGTH_INFO, with the drive geometry as a second try for a device that only implements that). And the reading: such a handle refuses a read that does not start on a sector boundary or is not a whole number of sectors long, for a call that works on any file, so the sector size comes back with the length and every read is widened to the sectors around what was asked for.

  The viewer and the hex pane read through one function for this, so they cannot disagree about it, and its arithmetic is tested against an ordinary file: reading through the sector path gives exactly the bytes reading without it gives, at every offset and every length. A refused open says it needs Administrator rights instead of leaving the system's "Access is denied" to be puzzled over, and the unsafe is in fcmd-platform with everything else that needs it.

Changed

• Ctrl+A over several files no longer makes them agree (SPEC 03 §7). The attributes dialog read the mode of the file under the cursor and wrote it onto everything selected: mark a hundred files with different permissions, press OK to change one bit, and the other eleven went with it. FAR has had the answer to this since forever and the spec has promised it since the beginning — a three-state box — and this is it.

  A box the selection does not agree about opens at [?]. Space walks it through on, off and back to leave it alone, so a box pressed by mistake can be put back to changing nothing, which a two-state box cannot offer. The boxes they do agree about are ordinary ticks and answer for all of them. The same holds for the read-only box both platforms have, and for Windows' own hidden, system, archive, temporary, offline and indexed bits.

  Underneath, what travels to the engine is two masks — the bits to set and the bits to clear — instead of one whole mode, and a bit in neither mask keeps the value each file has. Over one file every box is answered, so the two masks cover all twelve bits and come to exactly what a whole mode meant; over a selection they are the difference between a dialog that asks and a dialog that assumes. A server's files go the same way, with the mode read first.

[0.18.0] — 2026-10-29

Added

• The kernel can make a copy (general.system_copy, SPEC 03 §3b). The row was in System settings as a dim one. Reading a file into a buffer and writing it back is still the default and still earns it — progress every chunk, Esc answered within a few kilobytes, the same behaviour on every filesystem — but it is the one thing that cannot let the system copy the file itself, and on the filesystems people keep large files on that is the whole difference: copy_file_range on Linux, a chunk at a time, which is a reflink on btrfs, XFS and bcachefs and a server-side copy over NFS 4.2; fcopyfile on macOS, which clones on APFS; CopyFileExW on Windows, which knows a share's own server-side copy.

  It is a faster copy, not a second copy engine. It writes the same name.fcmd-part file, so the rename into place, the permissions and the times are the engine's own afterwards; a platform that will not take the call answers no rather than an error and the byte loop does the work with nobody told anything, because nothing went wrong; and only a failure an ordinary copy would hit as well is reported as one. Every call that needs unsafe or a #[cfg] is in fcmd-platform, as the workspace's rule has it.

  Off by default, because the cost is told in the same breath as the gain: where the kernel copies a whole file in one call — macOS and Windows — Esc is answered when that call returns rather than within the next few kilobytes, and that file's progress arrives in one piece. On Linux the copy is still made a chunk at a time, so neither applies there.

• The cursor may go past the end of a line (editor.beyond_eol, SPEC 10 §3.6). The row was in Editor settings as a dim one, because the setting did not exist: every movement and every insert has to agree about a column that is not in the text. They do now. Off — the default, as in FAR — the arrows stop at the last character and Right there goes to the next line. On, the columns to the right of the text are somewhere to be, which is what one wants to line up a column of numbers or to mark the same columns down lines of different lengths.

  The bargain is that moving about out there writes nothing. The spaces appear at the keystroke that puts a character in one of those columns, as part of that one edit, so a single Ctrl+Z takes the character and its padding away together — a file does not quietly grow trailing space because somebody moved the cursor through it. Backspace and Del out there move the cursor and leave the file alone; Del in particular does not pull the next line up from three columns past the end of this one.

• AArch64 is disassembled in the program (SPEC 05 §1.6). F5 decoded x86 and x86-64 and sent everything else to objdump, which on an Apple Silicon laptop or an ARM server means the viewer could not read the binaries actually on the machine. It reads them now, through yaxpeax-arm — pure Rust, so the Windows and macOS builds need no C toolchain — and everything built on the sweep comes with it: Enter follows a branch and Backspace comes back, F7 searches the instructions rather than the bytes, and the structure pane names the symbols beside them.

  Two differences from x86 are the whole of the decoder's character, and both are deliberate. An instruction is four bytes, always: so a word nothing decodes is one (bad) line rather than four — there is no sync to lose in a fixed-width instruction set — and stepping backwards is arithmetic instead of decoding forward from a guess. And a branch is shown as the address it arrives at, not as the displacement the encoding holds: b $+0x14 is what the bytes say, b 401014h is what the reader wants, and it is what Enter follows.

  The assembler stays x86. Reading an architecture and writing it are now separate questions in the code (Arch::disassemblable and Arch::assemblable), so F9 in the hex pane on an ARM binary says what it cannot do rather than writing four bytes of x86 into it and showing a plausible listing of them.

• The assembler writes addresses (SPEC 05 §2.8). F9 in the hex pane assembled registers, numbers and branches, and refused anything in brackets by name — which left out half of what a patcher reads. mov eax, [rbx+8] is the line one has just looked at on the screen, and retyping it is the job. So the brackets are now assembled: [base], [base+disp], [base+index*scale+disp], a bare [0x401000], and [rip+0x2e35] with the displacement counted from the end of the instruction, the way the disassembler prints it. The pieces may be written in any order, because that is how one retypes a line, and the numbers inside go through the same calculator as everywhere else. lea arrived with them, as the one instruction whose operand is the address itself, and so did the memory forms of mov, the arithmetic group, test, xchg, inc and its neighbours, push, pop and an indirect branch.

  How wide the thing at an address is, is the part that has to be right: the register on the other side says so, or a size word in front of the brackets does — byte, word, dword, qword, with masm's ptr for whoever writes it that way. When neither says, the instruction is refused with that sentence instead of guessed at, because mov [rbx], 1 could write one byte or eight and the difference is somebody's binary; a size word that contradicts the register is refused too. The encoding rules that are easy to get wrong — rsp and r12 needing a SIB byte, rbp and r13 needing a displacement that is there even when it is zero, an index with no base, rsp which cannot be an index at all, and the machine-word moves that must not carry a REX.W — are pinned down by their bytes, and everything still goes back through the disassembler before the dialog shows it, so a bug in the encoder is a refusal rather than a corrupted file.

[0.17.0] — 2026-10-29

Added

• A host key that changed says where the old one is written (SPEC 04 §6c). Accepting a key nobody has seen was already a question with the fingerprint in view; a key that is recorded and different was a refusal and a sentence, and then you had to go and find known_hosts yourself. Now the refusal is the same — a rebuilt server and somebody in the middle look exactly alike from here, and nothing accepts a changed key — but the dialog names the file and the line the old key is on, and its other button opens that file in the editor on that line. Cancel is under the cursor: this is not a question to answer by pressing Enter without reading it. Taking the line out stays the reader's own act, which is what ssh makes one do, for the same reason.

• A large file goes up to object storage in parts (SPEC 04 §8.3b). One PUT is the better answer while it works — one signature, one round trip, nothing left behind if it fails — and it stops working at five gigabytes, which is the service's own limit; well before that it is an all-or-nothing bet on a long transfer, an hour of upload thrown away by one dropped connection. So a file over 64 MiB is now cut into 8 MiB parts, each signed over its own bytes and read from where it lies in the file rather than copied, and the part size doubles as often as it takes to fit the file into the ten thousand parts the service allows. A failure aborts the upload — with a cancellation token of its own, so Esc cannot cancel the cleanup as well — because until the completion arrives the parts are stored and the object is not, and stored parts are a charge on somebody's account that no listing shows. The completion's own answer is read, too: it is the one request that can fail inside a 200. From outside nothing changes: the answer is the number of bytes written, whichever way they went. --set-able limits, so the tests drive the whole path with a thirty-byte file.

[0.16.0] — 2026-10-29

Added

• The clock in the corner (ui.clock), FAR's own spot: HH:MM in the top right corner over the panel frame, or at the end of the menu bar when that is always on, costing the panels no row. It is the last dim row in Interface settings, and the reason it was dim is the interesting part: the event loop waits for something to happen rather than polling, and a clock is the one thing on screen that changes with nobody pressing anything. So the wait now has a deadline when the clock is on — it ends when the minute turns, which is one redraw a minute rather than the fifty-nine a second-hand would need. Off by default, because over ssh or inside a multiplexer that redraw is traffic somebody is paying for. The screen saver and the window title can use the same deadline when they come.

• Every setting, as a list (Options → All settings). The dialogs group the dozen settings one changes often and say what each means; this is the other seventy, which is what FAR reaches by typing far:config. It is generated from the configuration itself — the file is dumped and each scalar becomes a row — so a setting added to the program is in the list the same day and a list that drifts from it is impossible. Typing narrows it, Enter or F4 types a value, Space flips a true/false one, Del puts back the value the program was built with, and a row that is no longer that is marked with a ·. Every value goes in through the same function --set key=value uses, so a word a setting cannot take is refused with a reason rather than written and found out later; a test holds the two ends together, so the list can never offer a setting nobody can change. The [[blocks]] — the highlighting and sort groups, the mask groups, the sites, the column sets — are left out: each has an editor of its own. The other half of that work is that --set now reaches every setting too: the comparison options, the drive dialog's columns, the archive limits and the shell prompt were readable in the file and not settable by name.

• The screen grabber (Alt+Ins, from any screen). The copy keys take what the program knows — names, paths, a block of a file; this takes what it drew, which is the set with no other answer: a process card, a help page, a hex dump, the sentence a comparison ended with. The terminal's own selection is worse at it — it takes the frame, the column rule and the padding, and over ssh it takes whatever the far end last painted. It holds the screen as it is, so moving about cannot change what is being copied: the arrows move the cursor, Shift with them marks a rectangle from where the cursor already was, PgUp/PgDn, Home/End and Ctrl+Home/Ctrl+End cover the rest, Ctrl+A marks the whole screen, Enter or Ctrl+Ins copies and closes, Esc closes and copies nothing. With nothing marked it takes the row the cursor is on. Trailing blanks come off each line, a blank row inside the rectangle stays, and a double-width character is one character rather than its two cells. It also answers, in the one way that works in the hex dump and the table too, the backlog's select and copy text in the viewer.

• Two settings that were dim rows. Always show the menu bar (ui.menu_bar) keeps the menu titles on the top row and starts the panels under it, so it costs a file the way the column titles do, and F9 lights a title and opens its menu on that same row. Save the setup on exit (ui.save_setup_on_exit) writes fcmd.toml on the way out, as Save setup writes it. Both are off by default, as they are in FAR: the row is a row of files, and a setting changed to see what it does should not become permanent by quitting.

• Ctrl+W is FAR's task list, and so is the Task list row in the Commands menu: the operating system's processes, which is what that key means in FAR — this program's own screens are F12. It opens the process panel the change-drive dialog has opened since 0.10.0, so F3 on a row still shows that process's card. On a line with something typed on it Ctrl+W stays the word-delete every readline has, as Ctrl+K stays kill-to-end.

• Options → Code pages opens the code page list, so the last dim row but one in that menu is a real one. It is the viewer's own Shift+F8 list (opt.codepages), opened where there is no file to read: what it is for there is marking the three or four pages F8 walks and giving one a name of its own, which is what FAR's dialog of that name is for too. One list rather than a second screen showing the same thirty-odd rows.

[0.15.0] — 2026-10-29

Added

• Two files side by side (Ctrl+Shift+D, and View file differences in the Commands menu). Compare by content says which of a hundred pairs differ; this says what differs in one pair — the gap a commander coming from Midnight Commander or Krusader notices first. The file under each panel's cursor, two columns with their own line numbers and a rule between them, and inside a changed line the part that actually changed marked in the selection's colours. Alt+↓ and Alt+↑ walk the differences, which is the key one presses forty times; the arrows, PgUp, PgDn, Home and End are the rows, ←/→ scroll both columns together, Tab changes which column one is reading, F1 opens the chapter and F12 lists it with the other screens. W, C and E ignore blanks, case and line endings and line the two files up again at once, so one watches the answer change; the line endings start from what the comparison dialog was last told, so the two agree about what "the same" means. Two files that are the same say so rather than leaving one scrolling for a difference that is not there. The alignment is patience diff in fcmd-core, with no dependency: the lines that occur once on each side are the anchors, the longest rising run of them is kept, and a region with no unique line left is finished with an exact table under four hundred lines. A moved function therefore reads as moved. Local files only, 16 MiB a side: the whole of both has to be in memory, and a silent download of two hundred megabytes is not what the key looks like it will do.

• The rest of FAR's insertion keys. Ctrl+Enter and its neighbours are now a table rather than four keys: what about a panel — the name, the path, the full name, or the full name in the form another machine could use — and which panel, the active one, the passive one, or the left or right one whatever has the focus. FAR's own keys are bound (Ctrl+F for the full name, Ctrl+Alt+F for its network form, Ctrl+Shift+[/] and Ctrl+Alt+[/] for the left and right panel), and a path on this disk has no network form, so that key says so rather than inserting a local path under a name that promises more.

• Masks select folders too, FAR's Select folders: panel.select_folders, off by default as in FAR, and a row in Panel settings. The keys that name a mask leave directories alone unless it is on — one types *.rs to select the sources — while select all and invert all include them either way, because they name no mask.

• A file opens where it was left. F3 on a file you have read before puts back the position, the code page, the mode, the wrap and the ten numbered bookmarks — FAR's own habit, and the dim row in Viewer settings is a real one now ([viewer] remember, on by default). It lives in the state file, newest first and capped at five hundred and twelve files; each answer is put back on its own, so a file remembered in a mode this build no longer has still opens at the right offset. Somebody who reads log files and wants the end of every one turns it off.

• The code pages are a list, and F8 walks the ones you mark. Shift+F8 in the viewer opens every code page the program offers — the five it handles itself and everything encoding_rs knows: the Windows pages, CP866, the two Macintosh ones, the ISO-8859 family, KOI8-R and KOI8-U, Shift_JIS, EUC-JP, ISO-2022-JP, GBK, GB18030, Big5 and EUC-KR. Enter reads the file as one, Ins marks a page as one F8 walks (shown with a *, and first in the list), F4 gives it a name of your own. F8 then cycles the marked ones rather than a fixed five — thirty-odd pages is not a cycle — and with nothing marked it walks the five it always did. Both answers live in [[codepage]] blocks that Save setup writes; an id is the WHATWG name, and cp1251, CP-1251 and a bare 1251 all name the same page.

[0.14.0] — 2026-10-29

Added

• The mask groups have an editor, and can be written down. <arc>, <temp> and <exec> were three fixed lists; now a [[mask_group]] block adds a group of your own — <images>, <sources> — or replaces one of the three, which is how <arc> learns about .cbz. F9 → Options → File masks is the list: what each group stands for, Ins for a new one, F4 to edit any row (a built-in one included), Del to take a block away. Everything compiled from a mask is compiled again at once — the colour groups, the sort bands, each panel's filter — and Save setup writes the blocks.

• The dialogs' own fields keep a history. Ctrl+↓ on a field one types the same thing into again — the search mask and text, the replacement, where to copy to, where to unpack, a group's masks — opens what has been typed there before, as the same list one types into, with the same Ins, Shift+Del and Del. Enter puts the row in the field and Esc leaves it alone; the dialog waits behind the list either way. Every dialog's OK feeds them, so nothing has to remember to.

• A history line can be pinned, and a history has a lifetime. Ins in any of the three histories pins the line under the cursor — marked with a * — and neither the size limit nor the new ui.history_lifetime can push a pinned line out. Shift+Del takes one line away and refuses a pinned one; Del empties the list of everything nobody has pinned, after asking. Those are FAR's own three keys. The lifetime is FAR's own as well: ninety days by default, counted from when a line was last used rather than from when it was first typed, 0 to keep everything for ever, and swept once when the state file is written.

• Descriptions wherever the panel stands. A descript.ion on a server or in a bucket is now read and written like one on this disk: the description columns, the information panel and Ctrl+Z work in a remote panel, and the file is fetched only when something on screen shows a description, which is what kept the habit off a network share in the first place. Inside a container it is read and not written — that would be a rebuild of the whole archive — and Ctrl+Z says so.

• A search result carries its descriptions. A copy, a move or a delete whose files came from several directories at once — which is what Alt+F7 leaves in the panel — now takes each line out of the directory it was in rather than none of them: the sources are grouped by their parent, and each side file is read, changed and written on its own.

• The histories are lists one types into. The command history, the folder history and the files read or edited all narrow as you type, with the frame saying what was typed, and the keys above work on what is left without closing the list.

• Alt+F10 finds a folder by name. A list of every folder the tree knows under the panel's root, narrowed by what you type — the frame shows the filter — with Enter to go there. It opens on the tree's cache, which now survives the session (written into the state file, capped at twenty thousand directories), and one bounded walk fills the rest in behind the dialog, breadth first so that a walk stopped by its limit has read the directories near the top. The copy dialog's own Alt+F10 opens the same list and puts the folder chosen into the destination — FAR's Tree button, under another key because F10 here is OK.

Fixed

• Tab is the way out of the quick view as well as the way in. In the viewer Tab moves the keys between the content and the structure pane, and the preview was taking the key even with no pane open — so the focus went into the quick view and stayed there. With no pane to move between, Tab is the panels' own key again.

[0.13.0] — 2026-10-28

Added

• An archive inside an archive, and an archive on a server. Enter on a .zip that is itself inside a .tar.gz, or on one in a remote panel or a bucket, now opens it. Every decoder here reads a file and seeks in it, so a container that is not a file on this disk is copied into <temp>/fcmd-<pid>/nested/ first — once, kept for as long as what it came out of has not changed, and thrown away when the program ends. The path stays what it is, sftp://srv/site.zip!/inner.tar.gz!/etc/nginx.conf, because that is where the file really is: the copy happens below the VFS, so the panel, the viewer, the finder and the job engine all got this at once. [arc] max_depth stops the recursion, the new [arc] max_spill_mb (default 1024) stops the disk filling, and both refuse by name. Such an archive is read-only — a rebuild of the copy would report a change to a file that is about to be deleted — and says so rather than half-writing anything.

• An encrypted archive asks for its password. A 7z whose contents — or whose header, so that not even the names show — are encrypted now opens: the panel and the viewer answer the refusal with a masked prompt, and what is typed goes into the container cache, which keeps it for as long as the program runs and writes it nowhere. The listing and every entry opened out of that archive then ask nothing; a wrong password asks again.

• Solid blocks in the archive dialog. Shift+F1 has 7-Zip's own solid box: ticked, the files of a 7z share one compressed stream, which is smaller. A block closes at 64 files or 128 MB, so reading one file out of the archive never decodes a whole tree, and one file per block stays the default for the same reason. A tar is solid anyway and a zip cannot be, so both ignore it; the box is remembered for the next dialog.

• The search looks inside archives. Alt+F7 has FAR's Inside archives box, off until it is ticked: with it, the walk steps into every container it can read and matches what is in them by name and by content. x.zip is walked as x.zip!/, so the mask, the size condition, the depth limit and the text scanner work in there exactly as they do on the disk, and a hit is an ordinary src.zip!/doc/readme.md that Enter, F3 and F5 already understand. It goes through the same container cache as the panels, so a nested archive or one that wanted a password behaves the same way; an entry over 64 MB is reported as a problem rather than read into memory.

• Ctrl+A works inside an archive. It asks the two questions the formats can answer — the permissions and the modification time — and OK writes the archive again with the entry's bytes and everybody else's untouched, through the same transactional rebuild as every other change. A dialog nobody touched writes nothing: the boxes are seeded from what the listing knows, and only what was changed is sent.

• Descriptions are read inside an archive. A descript.ion in a container is an entry like any other and the index is already in hand, so Ctrl+6, Ctrl+7 and the information panel show what it says in there as they do on the disk. Writing one back is a rebuild and Ctrl+Z still says so.

• The sort groups have a dialog. F9 → Options → Sort groups edits the [[sort_group]] bands the way the colour groups are edited: the list in the order they cut the listing, Ins beside the row the cursor is on, Del, F4, Ctrl+↑↓ to move one past its neighbour, and one dialog per band — a name, the masks, and whether it sits in front of the ungrouped files or behind them. Both panels re-sort at once; writing the first band turns the grouping on and taking the last one away turns it off, and Save setup writes the blocks.

Changed

• The menu letters are FAR's own. Every row the F9 menus share with FAR now wears the letter FAR marks for it, read out of FAR's own far/farlang.templ.m4 in each of the five languages both programs speak — Russian, English, German, Spanish, Italian. The wording is still ours; only the marker moved, onto the occurrence of FAR's letter nearest where FAR marks it. F9 F a is file attributes in both programs again, and a hand that knows FAR does not have to learn a second set. French, Chinese and the rows FAR has not got — the tabs, the tunnels, the checksums — keep the rule this program had, and give way where one of them would claim a letter FAR has already taken.

[0.12.0] — 2026-10-28

Added

• Ctrl+A says everything a file is. The attributes dialog gained the two times FAR shows and we did not — Created and, on Unix, the dim Record changed that no system can set — a Times in UTC box that re-reads all of them in that clock, and FAR's three buttons under them: Original, Current and Blank fill the rows in and leave the dialog open. It now names who the file belongs to, and on Windows offers temporary, offline and whether the indexer may look at it, with a dim line for what the file also is — compressed, encrypted, sparse, a reparse point — which are done rather than ticked. The creation time is written where there is a call for it, which is Windows.

• The quick view is the viewer, not a preview of it. Give the preview panel the focus and its keys are the reader's: F2 wraps, F4 walks the ways of reading a file, Shift+F4 is hex, F5 disassembles, F6 decompiles, F7 searches, F8 changes the code page, F11 opens the structure pane — and the key bar says so. Letters still belong to the command line, and the keys that would leave the file stay with the panel. Beside a process, socket or programs list the preview holds that row's card, which is the page F3 opens there.

• A services panel, in the change-drive dialog. Alt+F1/Alt+F2 → Services lists what the machine runs in the background with the state of each, F3 opens its card, and F5, F6 and F8 start, restart and stop it — the last two having asked first. systemd on Linux through systemctl, the Service Control Manager on Windows through its own API, launchctl on macOS. Nothing escalates: an action the system refuses is reported as needing root, which the program will not ask for on anybody's behalf, and the list is read again when an action comes back so the panel shows the state the service is in now.

• The process card is a page now, as full as FAR's own. F3 on a row of the process list used to answer with a dozen rows in a dialog. It answers with a page in the viewer: what it is (owner and group, the SID on Windows, session, priority, threads, bitness, when it started and how long it has been up), what it has taken and spent (resident, private, mapped and swapped-out memory, page faults, processor time in its own code and in the kernel, handles held, bytes read and written), where it came from (executable, directory, the whole command line), its environment, and every library it has loaded. It is in the viewer because the last two lists are longer than any screen — so it scrolls, searches and wraps like any other page. F3 on a row of the socket list opens the same page for whoever holds the socket, and on a row of the service list it is that service's card. Every row only where the system answers it: somebody else's process keeps its secrets, and the card says nothing rather than guessing.

• An empty list of connections is still a list. Alt+F1 → NetBox with nothing stored used to refuse to open and say so in the status line, which told nobody where they were or how to make the first session. It opens as a panel now, empty, and its key bar says what the keys do there: F4 edits the session under the cursor, Shift+F4 makes a new one, F8 forgets one — and the bar no longer offers Copy and MkFold on a list that has no files in it.

Changed

• The help is drawn by the viewer's Markdown view. F1 used to render its pages with a little wrapper of its own that knew a heading, a bullet and an indented block, and showed a heading in capitals. The pages are Markdown and the viewer already renders Markdown, so it renders them now: headings with a rule under them, real bullets, tables drawn with box characters, the inline marks taken off and the words under them coloured instead. The generated chapters — the keys, the commands, the settings — are written as Markdown too, so one renderer draws the whole book, and the dialog has inks of its own for it (help.heading.fg, help.code.fg, help.marker.fg, help.link.fg, help.frame.fg).

• The menu bar wears its letters, and F9 lights it without covering anything. Each of the five titles is drawn with the letter it answers to in the bar's own ink, as FAR draws them, and that letter is now a key: F9 then F is the files menu. F9 on its own lights the bar and leaves the panels where they are — Enter, ↑/↓, a title's letter or a click pulls a menu down, Esc rolls it back up, and a second Esc gives the panels back. Inside an open menu the rows keep the letters, as they do in FAR. The letter of the row one is standing on keeps its colour too, instead of disappearing into the cursor.

• The lists one picks from are drawn in the menu's colours, as FAR draws them: the drive dialog, the histories, the sort modes and the bookmarks are cyan with the key in yellow and the row under the cursor on black, instead of looking like a settings dialog. The two are different things — one is a list to choose from, the other a form to fill in — and in FAR they have looked different for thirty years.

• The size of a folder, measured and kept. Space (and F3 on a directory) measured one folder and said the figure in the status line, where it was gone a moment later. It now measures every selected folder — finding out which of five trees is the big one is the whole reason the key exists — and the answer becomes that directory's own size: the panel draws the figure in the size column in place of the word Folder, as FAR does, the selected-totals bar counts it, and sorting by size puts the big tree where it belongs. A flag says the figure was measured, because a directory has a size of its own — four kilobytes of it on most filesystems — and drawing that would answer a question nobody asked.

• Autocomplete on the command line (SPEC 06 §7.4), the largest thing the line was still missing. Four sources, each one a setting with three states — on, off, or only when Ctrl+Space asks: the names in the directory the panel is showing (free, because that listing is already on screen), the whole line again out of the history, the executables on the PATH (gathered once, and waiting to be asked by default, because gathering them reads every directory on it), and the environment's variables for a word that starts with $ or %. The first word of a line completes as a command — what the program runs itself, the prefixes, the PATH — and the rest as files. The list is drawn above the line, over the bottom of the panels, since below it are the status line and the key bar. It owns four keys and no others: ↑/↓ walk it, Tab takes a row, Esc closes it, and Enter still runs the line until somebody has walked into the list.

[0.11.0] — 2026-10-28

Added

• Columns of your own, for any of the ten views (SPEC 02 §3a). FAR has no separate keys for custom panel modes — its ten modes are the editable ones — so neither have we: a [[column_set]] block whose id is a view's digit is what that view draws, and a digit nobody has written a set for keeps the built-in list. Twelve column types, a width that is a number, a percentage, * or automatic, an alignment and a format per column: bytes writes a size out digit by digit, and a date takes a strftime string. A column the panel has no room for is dropped from the right, and a set that would leave the name unreadable drops another, which is the rule the detailed view already followed with its extra dates. FAR's own Column types and Column widths strings are read as well (far_types, far_widths), so a mode out of somebody's FAR configuration can be pasted in; what we have no column for — the stream size, the change time, the stream count — is named on the startup screen rather than dropped in silence. A set that asks for the owner, the group, the link count or the description puts the same worker to work as the view that shows it, and a view whose set asks for none of them pays nothing even though the mode it replaced would have.

• The help is read in the language the program is running in. The chapters' names are message ids in all seven catalogues, so the index is always the reader's own; the prose of a chapter is read from docs/help/<lang>/<file>.md when somebody has translated it and from the English otherwise, with one line above it — in that language — saying that is what it is. Italian is translated, all seven chapters, about eleven hundred lines; the other five languages are not yet, and now say so instead of quietly opening an English page under an Italian title. The site does the same from the same files: a help index per language, the chapters linked within that language, and the note on the ones that are still English — its navigation used to send an Italian reader to the English index.

• Sorting by description (Ctrl+F10) and by owner (Ctrl+F11), FAR's own last two sort keys and the last two we were missing. Neither field is in the listing, so the key asks a worker for it exactly as the view that shows it does: the panel sorts without it in the meantime and sorts again when the answer lands, keeping the cursor on the file it was on rather than on the row. A file nothing has said anything about sorts after every file that has. Both are also sort-list rows and both work as tie-breakers in panel.sort_chain.

[0.10.0] — 2026-10-28

Added

• The comparison goes into the subdirectories. The dialog's last two rows switch it on and say how deep (1 is the two directories themselves, 0 all the way down). Both trees are walked in a worker and paired by the path each file has under its own root, so a/b/c.txt is compared with a/b/c.txt; every pair is then settled by whichever of the §11 rules are on. The answer is a panel of what differs — ≠ on both sides and not the same, → only on the left, ← only on the right, ≈ the same but for the line endings — whose rows are the real files, so F3, F5 and F8 work on them. A difference three directories down cannot be shown as a marked row in a panel that is not showing it, which is why it is a panel and not a selection.

• The search engine's walker takes a depth limit, which is what makes that possible.

• The drive dialog's columns are filled on Windows too. The type, the label and the filesystem were empty there — which made three of the dialog's own switches switch nothing — because the standard library makes none of those calls. It asks for them now (GetDriveTypeW, GetVolumeInformationW), and for the share behind a mapped letter (WNetGetConnectionW), which is what the device column shows there. A letter is listed when the system will describe it at all, so an empty CD drive keeps its row; a drive that is not ready is not asked how big it is, because that is what puts There is no disk in the drive on the screen.

• $+ in the prompt counts the directories pushd has put away, as cmd.exe writes it.

• F9 in the change-drive dialog opens its switches as a dialog of boxes, as it does in FAR, with each row naming the Ctrl key it is — the keys are faster for anybody who knows them, and this is how one finds out they are there. OK keeps them and brings the list back for the same panel.

• Find the duplicate files under a directory (Commands → Find duplicates), the third thing FAR's compare plugin does. The tree is walked, the files grouped by size, and only what shares a size is hashed — so almost everything is settled without opening a file. What comes back is a panel of the copies, one row per file, numbered by group and ordered so the group that wastes the most space is first; the rows are the real files, so F3 reads one and F8 deletes what you pick. Nothing is deleted or even selected by the hunt itself, and empty files are left out.

• The comparison has a dialog, and the options the plugin everybody uses has. tool.compare (Commands → Compare with options) asks what the same file means before comparing: whether the names are matched with their case, whether the size and the time count, how many seconds apart two times may be and still be the same moment (two, for anything that has been to a memory stick), whether the bytes are read at all, read only where the times differ, or read only for the first so many KiB, whether a difference in line endings alone counts, whether only the selected rows are compared, whether to stop at the first difference, and whether to select only the newer copy or both sides of every difference. The answers go into [compare], so the next comparison is the one that was set up. The sentence at the end now also says how many pairs were taken as the same without being read, and whether the line-ending-only differences were counted.

• A panel of what is installed, under the sockets in Alt+F1/Alt+F2, with the size column holding what each program takes on disk — so Ctrl+F6 sorts by size, which is why one opens such a list. Windows reads the three registry keys the Control Panel's own list reads and hides what it hides; Linux reads dpkg's status file or pacman's descriptions. F3 is the program's card, including the command that would remove it, and F4 puts that command on the command line unrun. Nothing here uninstalls anything by itself.

• The prompt says which branch you are on, and is a format rather than a fixed string. [cmdline] prompt takes FAR's own letters — $p the path, $w its last part, $n the drive or the server, $d the date, $t the time, $@ for an elevated session, the bracket-and-sign letters, $h to take a decoration back out — plus $r, which writes (branch) inside a git repository and nothing outside one, and %GITBRANCH% for the bare name, spelled the way the plugin everybody installs spells it. The default is $p$r$g . Nothing is run to find the branch: the walk up to the first .git reads HEAD, follows the gitdir: of a worktree, and shows a detached head as the short commit — once per directory, not once per keystroke.

• A socket list, as a panel of its own, under the processes in Alt+F1/Alt+F2: the protocol, this end, the other end, the state and the process holding it, in columns. F3 on a row opens that process's card — the question a socket list is opened to ask. Linux reads the four tables in /proc/net and maps each row back to the process holding it through its open files; Windows asks GetExtendedTcpTable and GetExtendedUdpTable, which give the owning pid with the row. Nothing here closes a socket.

• F3 on the process list shows the process. It used to try to read /proc/<pid> as a file, which does nothing on Linux and nothing at all on Windows. Now it opens a card, asked for when the key is pressed rather than read from the listing: name, pid, what started it, whose it is, what it is doing, threads, resident and mapped memory, 32 or 64 bits, when it started, the executable, the working directory and the command line — every row the platform will answer and none that it will not. Windows gets the name, the parent, the threads, both memory figures, the bitness, the path and the start time, which is the whole of what it will give without reading another process's own memory.

• The change-drive dialog is FAR's. It opens over the panel it is about — five columns in from that panel's frame, which is FAR's own arithmetic — instead of in the middle of the screen, so a list that will send the right panel somewhere no longer looks like one about the left. The table is laid out the way FAR lays it out, with a rule between each pair of columns and a rule across the frame above the rows that are not drives. The cursor opens on the row for the panel one is actually looking at: a panel showing the process list is not on a drive, and was being offered the drive it was on before.

  Its columns are switched from inside it with the keys FAR uses — Ctrl+1 the type, Ctrl+2 the device, Ctrl+3 the label, Ctrl+4 the filesystem, Ctrl+5 the sizes, Ctrl+6, Ctrl+8 and Ctrl+9 whether removable, optical and network drives are listed at all, Ctrl+7 the panels that are not drives, and Ctrl+R to read the drives again. What one chooses goes into [drives] in the configuration, so it is still chosen tomorrow.

• The session editor has pages, as the NetBox plugin's own does: Session, Environment, Directories and the protocol's own page along the top of the frame. Ctrl+PgDn and Ctrl+PgUp turn them and wrap round, stepping over a page that the chosen protocol has nothing to say about — an SSH key file on an FTP session — which is drawn grey. The cursor comes with the page, and OK still reads every row whichever page is open. A third button, Connect, stores the session and goes there at once instead of returning to the list.

[0.8.0] — 2026-10-28

Added

• Text can be marked out on the command line. Shift with an arrow extends a selection from where it started, Ctrl+Shift with one takes a word at a time, Shift+Home and Shift+End reach either end. What is marked is drawn with its colours swapped, Ctrl+Ins copies that rather than the whole line — having marked it is having said what to copy — and typing, pasting or a backspace replaces it. Any arrow without Shift drops the mark.

• Three panels that are not drives, under the drives in Alt+F1/Alt+F2 and numbered as FAR numbers its own:

  NetBox — the stored sessions. Every [[site]] and [[s3]] block, plus whatever is open now, as a panel of rows named sftp://user@host. A panel rather than a dialog, so Enter connects and the panel becomes that server's directory, and the quick search and the keys work on it the way they work on files.

  Process list. What is running: the name with its pid beside it, and the memory it has resident in the size column — so Ctrl+F6 sorts by memory, which is what anybody opening it came to see. Linux reads /proc/<pid>/status; Windows takes a process snapshot and asks each one for its working set, and a process that refuses keeps its row with the column empty. macOS waits for a tested way to read its own list. Nothing here kills anything.

  Temporary panel. A panel of paths rather than a directory: what is in it can come from several directories at once, and F5 out of it copies the real files. It opens empty, and Ctrl+Shift+Ins puts what is selected in the other panel into it — adding to what is there, never the same path twice, and leaving every file exactly where it was.

• The last two view modes FAR has, so all ten are now there on FAR's own numbers. Ctrl+9 is the links view: how many names a file has, between the name and the size. One is an ordinary file, two or more is a file in two directories at once, and a column of them is how a hundred copies that are really one file stop looking like a hundred files' worth of space. The count costs a lookup per row — the nlink of a stat on Unix, a file that has to be opened on Windows — so it is fetched by a worker while that view is the one on screen, exactly as the owners are, and a file nobody may open leaves the column blank rather than claiming one name.

  Ctrl+0 is the alternative full view: the full view with the sizes written out, digits grouped — 1 234 567 where the full view says 1.18 M — for when the difference between 1.2M and 1.9M is the thing one came to see. The totals in the bottom frame stay abbreviated, being a summary rather than a figure to compare.

Changed

• The wide view fits its columns to the names it has. Ctrl+4 is name and size, and it always drew two columns: a directory of download names was then two columns of cut-off names, which is the one thing that view is supposed to prevent. It now fits as many columns as the longest name allows — two for short names, one for long ones, with the whole name readable — which is FAR's own rule. The longest name is measured once per listing, in the pass that filters it.

• F4 in the viewer turns a wheel instead of toggling hex: text → dump → hex → the laid-out document → the table → text again, skipping the turns a given file has no use for. A file is often none of the things its name says it is, and trying the next way of reading it should be one key rather than a choice from a list. The key bar says where the next turn lands rather than naming one destination for ever, which is also the answer to what F4 should be called there. Shift+F4 is hex and straight back, for when hex is the one that was wanted, and disassembly stays on F5.

• The font reset moved from Ctrl+0 to Ctrl+Alt+0. A number key in the panels is a view mode, all ten of them, and Ctrl+Shift+0 was already the first folder shortcut: the font is the newcomer and gives way. Ctrl++ and Ctrl+- are unchanged.

[0.7.3] — 2026-10-28

Added

• File descriptions (descript.ion), the one FAR habit this program had none of. A directory can keep a line about each of its files in a plain file beside them, one name and the rest of the line, a name with a space in it quoted — 4DOS's format, which FAR kept and which travels with the directory rather than living in a database somewhere.

  Ctrl+Z writes one: the dialog opens on what the directory already says about the file under the cursor, so changing a description is a key and a few characters rather than retyping it, and an empty answer takes the line away. Ctrl+6 shows names with their descriptions and Ctrl+7 adds the size and the time — FAR's own numbers, which were empty here until now. The information panel (Ctrl+L) spells out the description of the row under the cursor, and the panel's status line shows it beside the size and the date.

  The file is read in whatever code page it is in — one written under DOS is in a DOS code page — and written back in UTF-8; both of FAR's names are looked for, descript.ion first and then files.bbs. It is read only while something on screen shows a description, because a side file nobody is looking at is a round trip per directory on a network share; panel.descriptions = false turns the habit off altogether.

  And the descriptions follow what they describe: a copy leaves the line where it was and writes one at the other end, a move takes it with it, a rename takes it to the new name, and a delete takes it away — a description that outlived its file would land on the next file to be given that name. Only if the job really did something, so a cancelled copy leaves no description pointing at a file that never arrived.

[0.7.2] — 2026-10-28

Added

• A sort criteria chain. panel.sort_chain = ["ext", "name"] says what settles two rows the sort key leaves equal — up to three keys, asked in order, with the name having the last word after them whatever was asked, so the comparison is total and the order does not wander between two reads of the same directory. A key the chain repeats is skipped, and reverse turns the whole comparison round rather than only its first step. A word that is not a sort key is said on the startup screen rather than quietly sorting by name.

• Sort groups (Shift+F11, FAR's Group). Bands written in the configuration as [[sort_group]] blocks — a name, a mask in the filter's own grammar, and place = "front" (the default) or "back" — that pull some kinds of file in front of the listing and push others behind it whatever the panel is sorted by: sources first and build output last, in a directory that holds both. It is the thing no sort key can say, because it is about kinds of file rather than one field of them. The front bands keep the order they are written in, so do the ones behind, and what matches nothing sits between them; inside a band the ordinary sort still applies. Folders are not banded — they have their place at the top already — and reverse turns each band round rather than swapping the bands over. Writing the blocks turns them on, Shift+F11 toggles them per panel and says how many there are, and a block that does not parse is named on the startup screen and skipped. Shift+F11 was folders-first, which is a setting in the panel dialog here as it is in FAR; Group over that key is what FAR writes and what it has always meant.

• A memo field says what is in it. A dBase table keeps its long text in a second file beside it — a .dbt or an .fpt — and a memo field holds only the block number, which is what the cell showed: memo:42. That file is now opened and read, and the cell says what the block holds, flattened onto the one line a cell has. All three formats, each recognised by what it actually holds rather than by its name, because the name does not say which: FoxPro's .fpt (the block size big-endian at offset 6, a block opening with its type and its length), dBase IV's .dbt (the block size at 20, a block opening FF FF 08 00 and its length), and dBase III's .dbt (blocks of 512, the text running to the first 1A). The application looks for .dbt then .fpt beside the table, in either spelling — a table shouting in capitals usually has a memo file shouting back. Where there is no memo file to open, the cell says the block number, as before.

• The name, drawn, above what the program says on the command line. fcmd --help, --version, --paths, --list-themes and the rest now open with the name in letters. Into a terminal only: --dump-config > config.toml and --list-commands | grep are how these outputs are used, and a banner in front of them is something to strip. --man never gets one — its bytes are a file a packager installs.

Fixed

• An arrow ends a quick search. Alt+letters finds the row, and then ↓ did nothing at all: the search swallowed the key and there was no way out but Esc, which put the cursor back where it started — undoing the search one had just made. An arrow now closes the search and leaves the cursor on the row it found, so the first press ends the search and the next one moves. Esc still goes back to where you were, which is what it is for.

[0.7.1] — 2026-10-28

Added

• A command's output arrives while it runs. It was read to the end of both pipes and handed over in one piece, so a build that takes a minute was a minute of nothing followed by everything: a command one cannot watch. The worker now reads both pipes into one channel — interleaved the way they were printed, rather than all of one and then all of the other — and reports whole lines as they arrive; the application writes the $ command heading when the command starts and the lines land under it as they come. And the panels go off while it runs, the way the console comes forward in FAR, and come back when it ends. Ctrl+O gives the screen back early and the command carries on behind the panels; Options → Interface → Show a command's output while it runs (ui.command_screen) turns that off and leaves the panels where they are, with the output still filling the screen Ctrl+O opens as it is printed. A line rewritten in place with a carriage return — a progress bar — is kept as what it ended up saying.

Fixed

• The table mode's keys. ← and → did nothing in a table — the sideways scroll was written for unwrapped text and the mode was not in its match — Ctrl+←/Ctrl+→ shifted the hex dump by a byte, which in a table means nothing, and Home and End moved the byte offset while the table went on showing the row it was showing, so both looked broken. Now: the arrows move the window sideways and stop where the last column ends rather than scrolling into empty space; Ctrl and an arrow jump a whole column, which is the unit a table has and a wall of text has not; Home and End go to the first and last screenful of rows.

• Shift+F3 makes a table of any file that reads as one. It took the name's word for it, so tab-separated columns in a .txt — as common as in a .tsv — had no way into the mode, and neither had a log laid out in columns. The key now refuses only a file with no table in it: one whose first bytes are not text, or one that does not come apart into two columns or more. What opens as a table by itself is unchanged and still goes by the name, because what a file opens as has to be predictable; the key is the less fussy of the two, and since the same key goes back to the source a wrong guess costs one keystroke.

• A DBF's numbers are read down their last digit. Every cell was laid out to the left, so a column of prices was a staircase. The numeric field types (N, F, I, Y, B, O) now sit on the right of their column and everything else stays where it was.

• A deleted DBF record has its own column. The * that marks one was stuck on the front of the first cell, and in a column of numbers *1 reads as a number nobody can tell from 1. It is now a column one character wide in front of the fields. The status line's rows × columns still counts the fields, not that column.

• A DBF written under DOS is read as DOS. The header's language byte was mapped to whatever Windows code page was nearest, and code page 437 — the one a table written under DOS actually carries — was mapped to 866, which is Cyrillic: a German table came out with temporäre as tempor„re. The 437 family now goes through the viewer's own 437 table, the one it has had since it learned to show a DOS text file, and the Shift-JIS, GBK, Big5, EUC-KR and Thai drivers are mapped as well. 850, 852 and the other DOS tables encoding_rs does not carry still fall back to the Windows table that agrees with them on the accented letters, which is what a field holds.

• The command line walks its history with the arrows. ↑ and ↓ with something on the line now step back and forth through what was run before, which is what every shell does and what anybody typing there reaches for; FAR's own Ctrl+E and Ctrl+X still work, and on an empty line the arrows belong to the panel, as every shared key does.

Changed

• Three keys the editor answered and never admitted to, found by reading its bar against its keymap: F3 marks a block, F6 hands the file to the viewer, F9 assembles what is in it. The bar says so now. It also promised 8 Replac while replace was on Ctrl+F7 alone, so F8 does it too — a bar that promises a key has to be telling the truth. And the panels' bar now says 11 Plugin, which F11 has done since there were plugins.

• The key bar always shows all twelve keys. The editor's bar had seven boxes, because the editor uses seven of the function keys; the viewer's had eleven; the panels' had eleven. So the same key sat in a different place on each screen, and F4 in the editor was the third box along. All twelve are drawn now, in twelve equal boxes, with the ones a screen has no use for left empty — the bar is read sideways, and F5 is the fifth box along wherever one is. Clicking an empty box does nothing, as before. The same rule covers the modifier rows: holding Shift empties the boxes Shift has nothing on rather than closing up the gaps.

• The hex dump widens in blocks of eight. → and ← in a dump set how many bytes a row holds, and the steps were the powers of two — 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 — so on a wide screen there were three widths where there is room for eight, and a press doubled the row instead of adding to it. They are now 8, 16, 24, 32, 40, 48, 56, 64: eight bytes is the group the dump already draws a gap between, so every press adds one whole group and the columns stay where the eye expects them. A window too narrow for even eight bytes still draws four, which is the one width that is not a block of eight and the reason it is there.

[0.7.0] — 2026-10-28

Added

• A dBase table opens as a table — .dbf, in the mode the last release added, and this is the reader the format was waiting for. A DBF says in its first bytes how many records it holds, how long one is, where they start and what the columns are called with the width of each, so the table is laid out without a single record being read and row n is one multiplication and one read. Nothing but the window on screen is ever touched: a two-gigabyte table opens as fast as a log does, and the sixteen-megabyte limit the text formats have does not apply to it at all.

  The field types are read as what they are: text with its padding off, numbers as written, a date as YYYY-MM-DD (and empty where it was never set), a logical as true/false, the binary integer, currency, double and timestamp types, and a memo field as the block number it holds — reading the .dbt/.fpt beside the table is a second file and still owed. A deleted record is shown with a * in front of its first cell rather than being skipped: a table whose deleted rows vanish is one whose row count does not add up, and finding them is half of why anybody opens a DBF. The header's language byte picks the text encoding, the status line names the flavour (dBase III, Visual FoxPro…), and a header that claims more records than the file can hold is read as far as it goes and says cut.

• The colour groups have a dialog. F9 → Options → Files highlighting — the entry has said not here yet since the menu bar was written, and the [[highlight]] groups that shipped in 0.6.0 had no interface but the configuration file. The list shows them in the order they are tried, which is the order that decides, and each row is drawn in its own colours: a list of colours one cannot see would send you back to the file to find out what a group does.

  Enter or F4 edits the group under the cursor, Ins makes a new one beside it — where a new group lands matters, since the first match wins — Del takes one away, and Ctrl+↑ / Ctrl+↓ move one past its neighbour. The dialog itself takes exactly the words the file takes, because it is the same condition set and the same parser: a mask list, files or folders, a size window, an age in days on any of the four timestamps, the attribute letters, and the two inks. A condition that does not parse comes back on the dialog with every field still filled in and the problem named; a group with no condition at all is refused rather than painting every row.

  A change is in force on the panels the moment it is accepted, and Options → Save setup writes it to fcmd.toml — which the status line says each time. The dialog deliberately does not write the file by itself: that file is one people edit by hand, with comments in it, and saving regenerates it.

• Alt+F11: the files you have read or edited. FAR's own key, and the last of the three histories the Commands menu promised — the entry used to say not here yet. Newest first, Enter reads a row, F4 edits it, and it survives the session in the state file like the command and folder histories (ui.file_history says how many to keep).

  It is written in the one place every viewer and every editor passes through, which is also what makes it right for a file on a server: the viewer is given the remote path, so that is what is remembered, while the copy fetched into the program's own temporary directory is left out — a history of paths that will not exist tomorrow is worse than no history. A file opened again moves to the top rather than appearing twice, because the list is where I have been and a file read five times is one place. A row whose file has gone says so rather than opening nothing.

[0.6.0] — 2026-10-28

Added

• A .csv opens as a table. Shift+F3 in the viewer, and a file whose name says it is tabular opens that way: a heading and a rule that stay where they are while the records scroll under them, columns lined up, one row to a record. .csv, .tsv, .tab, .jsonl and .ndjson for now; the same key goes back to the commas, Shift+F4 has the table in the cycle with the text, the dump and the hex, and ←/→ move the window across a table wider than the screen.

  The delimiter is guessed — a comma, a semicolon, a tab or a bar, whichever gives the most lines with the same number of fields, which is what a table is — and the status line admits the guess along with the shape of the table, so a wrong one is obvious at a glance rather than silently shaping the screen. A quoted field may hold the delimiter and a newline, as RFC 4180 says, so a record is not a line. A row with more fields than the header has them, under a column named after its number, because an export with a short header is common and dropping data would be worse.

  For JSON Lines the columns are the keys of the first two hundred records, in the order they are written in the file; a record carrying a key that turned up later shows it in a last column called … rather than losing it, and a line that is not an object — a stray [ from somebody's JSON array — is counted in the status line rather than drawn as a row of nonsense. A nested value is its own compact JSON, and a null is an empty cell.

  Like a laid-out Markdown document a table is read whole, because a column's width cannot be known from the part of the file on screen; over sixteen megabytes the file opens as text and says so. ui.table = false, or the box in the interface settings, turns the first screen back into the source for good. What this mode is not, and deliberately: a spreadsheet and a query tool — no editing, no sorting, no filtering, each of which wants an answer about writing the file back that a viewer does not have.

• Every menu row has its letter. The mechanism shipped a while ago — & in a label marks the letter and the dropdown draws it highlighted — but only four labels carried a marker, so the rest fell back to "the first row whose label starts with it" and several rows could not be reached by a letter at all. Every row of every menu now claims a letter of its own, in all six languages written in an alphabet, by a rule rather than one at a time: the first letter of the first word that no other row of that menu has taken, or any free letter of the label where every word's initial is gone. A test asserts that no two rows of one menu claim the same letter, in every language, so a new entry cannot quietly shadow an old one.

  Two things fell out of the sweep. The Files owners view had no menu row at all, and the Commands menu listed Folder shortcuts twice — the same words, the same Ctrl+D, the same command — so it now appears once, after the associations, where FAR puts it. And a label that doubles as a dialog title is drawn without the marker: a frame is not a menu row.

• Ctrl+8: who the files belong to. FAR's file-owners view, on FAR's own number: name, size, owner, group. The two names take the room the date column had, because somebody asking who a file belongs to is not asking when it was written, and on a panel too narrow for both the group goes and the owner stays.

  Who a file belongs to is deliberately not part of a listing: it costs a lookup per file — getpwuid through NSS on a Unix, a security descriptor and a SID lookup on Windows, either of which can reach across a network — so nothing is paid for it unless this is the view on screen. Choosing the mode asks a worker, and the two columns fill in a moment later with the listing already up. One cache serves a whole directory, since a listing is nearly always one or two accounts repeated. A row nothing has come back for is blank rather than a guess, a number with no account behind it is shown as the number, and a panel on a server or inside an archive asks nothing at all.

• A fix the dialogs needed: the mouse box in F9 → Options → Interface settings reported unknown setting ui.mouse when the dialog was accepted, because that one key had never been added to the configuration's own setter. A test now walks every row of every settings dialog and asserts the configuration knows the key, so a row that looks like it works cannot fail only when somebody presses OK.

• The system clipboard, through the terminal. Ctrl+Ins in the panel copies the names of what is selected, one per line; Alt+Shift+Ins copies them with their whole paths; Ctrl+Ins copies the command line instead while there is something on it; and a block copied or cut in the editor now goes on the system clipboard as well as on the editor's own.

  It is done with OSC 52 — the terminal is asked to carry it — rather than with a clipboard library, and that is the whole point: no X11 or Wayland dependency, no pbcopy, no unsafe, no platform code, and it reaches the clipboard of the machine you are sitting at even when the program is running on another one through ssh, which a clipboard library on the far end cannot do. ui.clipboard = false, or the box in the interface settings, turns it off for anyone who would rather their terminal were not asked.

  Reading the clipboard stays the terminal's job: its own paste key hands us the text, and that now goes where the text was meant to go.

• Pasted text lands where it belongs. A paste used to reach only a prompt; it now reaches the command line, a dialog row, the editor and a terminal. A paste is not typing, and is not treated as typing: the editor and a real terminal take all of it, newlines and all, while everything that is one line takes the first line and says how many more there were. A command copied from a web page arrives with its newline still attached, and running it before it can be read is the accident this avoids. A carriage return from a Windows clipboard is no longer a character to insert.

• A size condition in the find dialog (Alt+F7). The row takes the same words as every other size condition in the program: 100M finds everything from a hundred megabytes up, 1M-1G a window, -4K everything smaller. Leave it empty and size is not asked about. It answers the question a full disk raises — where did the space go — without a separate tool, and the results frame repeats the condition next to the mask so a list of hits read later still says what was asked for. A size that is not a size comes back on the dialog, with the field still holding what was typed.

• Colouring files by what they are. A theme says what an archive or a hidden file looks like; a [[highlight]] group in fcmd.toml now says it for whatever you like — a mask, a size window, an age in days on any of the four timestamps, attributes, files or folders — written in the same words the filter dialog takes, because it is the same condition set. The first group that matches a row decides, so the order in the file is the order that counts, and FAR's built-in six come after them, which leaves a file nothing is said about looking exactly as it did.

  The ink is a colour (#d7875f, red, idx:208) or the name of a theme colour such as file.archive — and a theme colour is looked up every time the row is drawn rather than once at startup, so a group follows Ctrl+Shift+T from one theme to the next. A group with no condition is refused, because it would paint every row, and a group that does not parse is a warning on the startup screen with its name in it: a colour is not worth refusing to start over.

[0.5.0] — 2026-10-26

The first release under the name it keeps. The program is FinalCommander and the command is fcmd; a configuration written for 0.4.0 is read exactly as it was, under its old file names, with one line on the startup screen saying which file that was.

The rest of the release is a panel that notices what it did not do itself, a panel that shows what FAR's shows — the extension in its own column, the dates and the allocated size of the detailed view, the device and the memory in the information panel — and the first crate in this workspace allowed to make the calls the standard library does not, which is what finally puts free space on Windows.

Added

• Free space on Windows, and the rest of what a device can say. The panel frame has shown the free space on Unix since it had a frame and nothing at all on Windows, because statvfs is not a call Windows has. There is now one crate — fcmd-platform — for the handful of answers the standard library does not have, and it makes each platform's own call: statvfs, GetDiskFreeSpaceEx and GetDiskFreeSpace, /proc/meminfo, sysctl, GlobalMemoryStatusEx. It is the only place in the workspace allowed unsafe, and every call in it carries a line saying why it is sound.

  What it buys, beyond the frame: the drives dialog (Alt+F1/Alt+F2) fills its two size columns on Windows as it already did on Unix — the letters were there, the sizes were not. The information panel (Ctrl+L) now says what the device holds, what is left on it and how big its allocation unit is, how much memory the machine has and how much of it is free, and what the cluster size costs the directory on screen — the figure FAR calls slack. And the detailed view has its allocated column: what each file takes on the device rather than what it holds, rounded to whole clusters, which is the column FAR puts second. A panel whose device said nothing — a server, an archive — has no such column rather than a blank one.

• A quick view of a folder says something. Ctrl+Q on a directory used to print one line — that it is a directory — and leave the rest of the frame empty. It now fills with what FAR puts there: the folder and when it was last written, then what the device under it holds, what is left on it, how big its clusters are, how much memory the machine has, what the directory holds and what the cluster size costs it. The same block the information panel draws, because it is the same question asked from the other side.

• The detailed view has FAR's columns. Ctrl+5 showed the name, the size, one date and the attributes; it now shows what the file was written, when it was made and when it was last read, in FAR's order, with the attributes after them. The two extra dates are dropped, the last one first, as soon as keeping them would leave the name unreadable, so a half-width panel shows what the full view shows with the attributes after it; a filesystem that does not keep one of the dates leaves that column blank rather than inventing an epoch. The allocated size is the column above.

• The keys the keyboard reference had promised. A sweep through docs/03-keymap.md comparing every row against the keymap the program actually resolves turned up keys that were documented and dead. Three of them were worth having and are now bound: Ctrl+P hides the panel that does not have the focus (FAR's own, and the focus stays where it is), Shift+F10 saves and leaves the editor in one key, and Ctrl+W takes the word before the caret off the command line, as every readline does. The editor also gained delete-word-right (Ctrl+Del, Ctrl+T), which it had only in one direction.

• The full view separates the extension from the name, as FAR does: the names run down the left of the name field and the extensions down its right, against the size column, so a directory of one kind of file reads as a list rather than as a paragraph. A folder with a dot in its name is not a file with an extension (docs.old stays whole), a dotfile's leading dot starts its name rather than an extension, and an extension too long for the column is left where it was written. The other views, the status line and everything that names a file still show the name whole.

• A panel notices what it did not do itself. A local panel watches the directory it is looking at — inotify on Linux, FSEvents on macOS, ReadDirectoryChangesW on Windows — and re-reads it when something lands there: a build that wrote a file, a download that finished, another program that moved one out. Until now the directory stayed as it was read and Ctrl+R was the only way to find out. The watch is debounced, so a git checkout that touches a thousand files is one re-read and not a thousand, and the re-read keeps the cursor on the name it was on and the selection on the names that are still there. One watch per panel and local paths only: a server reports nothing locally, and an archive is a file. panel.auto_refresh turns it off, and Options → Panel settings has the box.

Changed

• The program is called FinalCommander, and its command is fcmd. It shipped as SupremeCommander up to 0.4.0; the name is now the one it will keep. Everything that carried the old name carries the new one: the command, the crates (fcmd-core, fcmd-vfs, …), the configuration (fcmd.toml, fcmd-state.toml, fcmd-macros.toml, fcmd-menu.toml, fcmd-plugins/), the manual page, the plugin environment ($FCMD_CWD and the rest) and the release archives (FinalCommander-linux-x86_64-<version>.tar.gz, with fcmd inside). Nothing about what the program does has changed with it.

  A configuration from 0.4.0 keeps working untouched: every file is looked for under its new name first and its old one after, so scmd.toml is still read — and still written — with one line on the startup screen saying which file it was and what to call it instead. The same goes for the state, the macros, the user menu and the plugins folder.

• Ctrl+O takes the panels off rather than opening a screen of its own. It used to show the output of past commands as a read-only view you could only scroll and leave; FAR's Ctrl+O hides the panels and hands the screen back to the console with everything else still live. It does that now: the command line, the menus and every key keep working with the panels off, PgUp and PgDn turn pages through the output, and the same key brings the panels back. The Commands menu row that says Panels on/off finally does.

• The confirmations have buttons, and the buttons name the verb. { Move } and [ Cancel ], as FAR has it, rather than a line of text explaining that Enter means yes: a reader who glances at the dialog and its button should know what is about to happen without reading the sentence again. The label comes from the action itself — the delete, the wastebasket, the wipe, the overwrite, the discard, the quit — so a button cannot say one thing and do another. The arrows and Tab move between the two, Enter takes the one that is lit, Esc is still the way out, and the dialog opens on the action because that is what the person who opened it meant to do.

• Three bindings moved off Alt+<letter>, which belongs to the quick search. A binding always wins over the search, so each of them cost a letter one could never search a listing for: the site list (Alt+N → Ctrl+Shift+N), the quick filter (Alt+I → Ctrl+Shift+I) and the theme (Alt+T → Ctrl+Shift+T). The editor's Alt+I and Alt+U stay where FAR has them — there is no quick search in an editor to collide with.

Fixed

• The panel's column titles were English in every language. Name, Size, Date Time and Attr were literals in the drawing code, beside Up and Folder, which have been translated since the panels were written. They go through the catalogues now, with the three new headings of the detailed view, so a panel in Italian says Nome and Dimens. and one in Russian says Имя and Размер.

• The keyboard reference says what the program does. The rows that named a key nothing was bound to now say what is true: the command line's path insertion is Ctrl+[ / Ctrl+] (one row, not two contradicting each other), Esc clears the line and Ctrl+U swaps the panels, multi-rename and copying names to the clipboard are named as not built yet, and compare directories, test archive and "other panel follows cursor" are named as what they are — menu entries with no default key, because Alt+<letter> belongs to the quick search. The profile table listed five profiles where two are built; the other three are now under a heading that says they are planned.

• The attributes dialog was taking bits away on Windows. Hidden, System and Archive were seeded with false rather than read off the file, and OK writes every box — so opening Ctrl+A on a hidden file and pressing OK cleared all three on a file nobody meant to change. The archive bit is set on nearly everything Windows writes, so it happened every time the dialog was used. The boxes now open on what the file carries, which also means the listing carries it: SYSTEM and a new ARCHIVE flag are read where HIDDEN and READONLY already were.

• A junction sorted among the files. A link that points at a directory is a link, and dirs_first asked the kind, so Documents and Settings sat below every folder — where nobody reading a C:\ listing looks for it. What decides now is whether the row opens as a directory, which is also what the size column answers (Folder, not the link's own meaningless byte count). What the entry is has not changed: the @ stays on the name, and deleting it still deletes the link rather than the tree.

• The first Enter of a quick search did nothing one could see. Every keystroke had already moved the cursor, so the Enter that closed the search only confirmed what was on the screen and a second one was needed to open the folder. It now closes the search and opens what it found, which is FAR's behaviour: one key, one result.

• "Delete 1 items". The confirmation counted where it should have named: deleting one file asked about 1 items, in every language, which is the sentence nobody means to write — and then listed the name underneath anyway. One file is now named in the question (Delete a.txt (4 K)?) and not repeated below it; several are still a count with the first three names under it. The three confirmations that count — delete, wastebasket, wipe — carry a plural selector in all seven catalogues rather than one form that is wrong half the time.

• Ctrl+PgDn did nothing. It is FAR's way into a directory or an archive and the other half of Ctrl+PgUp, which worked; the keymap document has listed it since the feature inventory and no profile ever bound it, so the key was dead. It opens what the cursor is on, and the keymap test now asserts both halves of the pair rather than only the one somebody thought of.

• The hex dump widened in steps it could not draw. The row width was a free number moved eight at a time, but a dump is only ever drawn at a power of two: from 16 the first press set 24 and drew 16 — nothing happened — the second set 32 and drew it, and every press past the widest the window could hold kept counting up where nobody could see it, so coming back took as many presses as had been wasted. The steps are now the widths it is drawn at (4, 8, 16, 32, 64), one press is one visible step, and the setting stops at what the window can hold rather than storing a width for a window nobody has. The arrows do both directions: widening with a key that cannot narrow again is a key pressed once too often.

• The drive letter takes the drive. Alt+F1 then C goes to C:\ instead of moving a cursor one then has to press Enter on — thirty years of fingers expect the letter to be the key. The connections and buckets keep the numbers FAR gives them.

• &Medium in the menu. The ampersand is the marker for the letter a row answers to — the theme has had a colour for it (menu.hotkey.fg) since the first menu — and nothing ever consumed it, so the rows whose labels carried one showed the marker instead of a key. It now names the key: the letter is drawn in the hotkey colour and typing it takes the row, with && for a literal ampersand and the first marker winning. Rows with no marker still answer to the letter they start with, which is what FAR does and what a catalogue with no markers needs.

[0.4.0] — 2026-10-25

The things a user reaches for that were not there. Three more ways to reach files — FTP, FTPS and WebDAV in the netbox, 7z read and written in pure Rust — and the keys and dialogs that make the program somebody's own rather than everybody's: the user menu on F2, file associations behind Enter, the palette editor, the editor's and the viewer's own settings, the mouse, and the viewer's chrome on FAR's keys. Underneath, every path handed to Windows now goes past MAX_PATH. And the project has a site, generated from the repository's own documents.

Added

• The viewer's chrome, and the settings behind it. Three rows a reader may take away one at a time, on FAR's own keys: the key bar (Ctrl+B), the top line with the name and the position (Ctrl+Shift+B), and a scrollbar down the right edge (Ctrl+S), which is the one that is off until asked for. Every row taken away is a row of content gained, which is the whole reason for the keys: one long line, or a wide hex dump, wants the window.

  The Ctrl+B question the backlog had left open is settled and it cost nothing: it was one of three spellings of page-up here — a vi habit — and PgUp and Ctrl+Up still page up, so FAR's key went to FAR's feature.

  The scrollbar says where in the file the reader is rather than how much of it is on screen: how many bytes a screenful holds is not a fixed fraction of a file — a wrapped line, a hex dump and a rendered Markdown page each answer differently — so the thumb is one row at the percentage the top line already shows.

  Behind them, [viewer] and F9 → Options → Viewer settings, the dialog the Options menu had been offering as a dim row: the three chrome rows, the wrap a file opens with (off, char or word) and the tab width, which is eight because that is what a terminal and cat do — a file that lined something up with tabs was written against that number. The division is FAR's: the setting is what a file opens with, and the key is what this reader wants of the file in front of them, so a key writes nothing back. Remembering a file's own position and code page is a dim row there, because it wants the store the histories want.

• The user menu (F2), which is the feature that makes a commander somebody's own: a few lines they run ten times a day, each with a label and a letter. It lives in fcmd-menu.toml beside the settings — fcmd --paths prints where, and F2 with no file says so rather than opening an empty box — and a directory can carry its own .fcmd-menu.toml, whose rows come above the ones that are everywhere, because the menu of the project one is in is the one wanted while in it.

  A row holds command lines, not a dialect of its own: the same lines the command line takes, so {file}, {selection}, {list} and {ask:title=…} all work, internal commands and prefixes included. Several lines run in order and stop at the first failure, one at a time. The rule that makes that work is who owns the next step: a line that started a shell owns it and the rest waits for that shell to report; a line that asked a question owns it, because the answer is what starts the shell; a line that was internal (cd /tmp) is finished when it returns, so the next goes at once; and a line that put the viewer or the editor on the screen ends the row, because commands running behind what the user is now looking at is the opposite of what the screen says.

  when keeps a row out of the way where it has no use: four facts — panel.has('Cargo.toml'), file.is('*.rs'), panel.selected, panel.local — with !, && and ||. No parentheses, because a condition that needs them belongs in a script. A condition it cannot read is refused by name and the row stays on screen with the reason: an entry that vanished over a typo in its own when would be impossible to work out, which is the argument against the usual "evaluate to false and say nothing".

  Submenus nest, a row that opens one says so (▸), and Esc inside a submenu goes back to the menu it came from rather than out of the menu. Still to come, and in the backlog: reading FAR's FarMenu.ini as it stands, separators between groups, a dialog to edit the entries, and Shift+F10 for the row taken last.

• A site for the project, published on GitHub Pages from the repository's own documents. crates/fcmd-site is a generator, not a site: it reads README.md, CHANGELOG.md, the commander survey in docs/00-landscape.md, the help chapters in docs/help/ and the screenshots the renderer itself draws into docs/shots/, and writes 38 static pages — the landing page with the argument and the screenshots, what the one file replaces, what works today, the comparison with the other commanders, the download page for the current release on each platform, the navigable help and the changelog.

  Two decisions are worth writing down. The pages carry no framework, no web font and no script: one hand-written stylesheet, inline SVG screenshots, and a page that works out of a file:// URL and in a text browser. And nothing is written twice — a page is its document rendered, so it cannot drift from it; a section renamed in the README fails the build instead of publishing a page with a hole in it. The landing page, the two README sections and the download page exist in the seven languages the interface speaks, and a page whose source document is English says so in a note rather than pretending.

  cargo run -p fcmd-site -- --out site writes it; .github/workflows/pages.yml builds it on every push, checks that the pages that matter are there and not empty, and keeps them as the run's artifact, which is downloadable and reads correctly off the disk. Publishing is a separate decision and nothing takes it automatically: a site on GitHub Pages is public to everyone, so it goes up only when a person starts that workflow from the Actions tab and answers yes to its one question. It also needs Pages switched on for the repository with "GitHub Actions" as the source, which no workflow can change, so a manual run that finds it off says the site was built and not published rather than failing.

• Paths past MAX_PATH on Windows. A Windows API call given a path of 260 characters or more fails, however much room the filesystem has — NTFS has allowed 32,767 since 1993, and it is the Win32 layer in front of it that does not. A file manager meets the difference every day: node_modules nested four deep, a build tree, a path from a server that was fine where it came from.

  So every path handed to the operating system now goes through fcmd_core::os_path, which on Windows adds the verbatim prefix — \\?\, or \\?\UNC\ for a share — to an absolute path of 240 characters or more, and on every other platform is the identity. 240 rather than 260 because a directory is allowed twelve fewer characters than a file: what goes in it has to fit too.

  Two things it deliberately does not do. It does not prefix a path holding . or .., because a verbatim path is not normalised by Windows and the .. would arrive at the filesystem as a name — such a path keeps the behaviour it had, rather than gaining a new way to fail. And it is not a manifest declaring the process long-path aware, because that also needs a registry setting on the machine and is not something a program can rely on by itself.

  The test is end-to-end rather than about the string: a directory twelve deep, a file copied into it through the job engine, read back, renamed and deleted. It passes on a Unix because PATH_MAX is 4096; on Windows it passes only because the prefix is there, and the CI runner is what proves it.

• Editor settings (F9 → Options → Editor settings), and the [editor] section behind them. The tab policy is three choices and not a box, as FAR has it: keep leaves every tab alone, typed turns a newly typed tab into spaces, and all also expands the tabs already in the file when it is opened — which changes the file, so it is not the default and the status line says how many lines it touched, because the next save will write that difference. Beside it: the tab width, the automatic indent, spaces and tabs drawn (·, and → followed by its padding, which is how a mixed indent becomes visible), and whether the cursor lands at the start of what a search found or just past it — the first is for reading, the second for typing over it.

  The cursor beyond the end of a line is in the dialog as a dim row and stays unimplemented: every movement, every insert and the block arithmetic would have to agree about a column that is not in the text, which is a change through the whole editor rather than a row in a dialog.

• Four editor keys that were each somebody's habit. Ctrl+Q arms the next key to go in as itself — a control character, or a real tab where tabs are expanded, which is the only way either gets into a file; a key with no character of its own says so rather than inserting nothing. Ctrl+Shift+Ins adds the block to what is on the clipboard instead of replacing it, so a few pieces are gathered and pasted in one go. Ctrl+N and Ctrl+E put the cursor on the first and the last line on the screen, leaving the screen where it is. And Alt+I now moves the line the cursor is on by one indent when nothing is selected, instead of typing a tab — Tab is the key for that, and Alt+U already worked this way.

• A palette editor (F9 → Options → Colours…, or opt.colors). Every colour the interface asks for, one per row and in the order they are declared, with the value as a theme file writes it and the colour shown twice — as ink on the panel background, and as a background behind the panel's ink. Both, because a colour is only ever used as one or the other and one swatch would be half an answer.

  Enter asks for a colour and takes everything a theme file takes: a name, default, idx:208, ansi:4, #ff8000, #f80. The field opens on what the row is set to, so a shade is nudged rather than retyped, and anything that is not a colour is refused by name and changes nothing.

  The change goes onto the live theme at once — a colour one cannot see is a colour one cannot choose — so it is on the screen before it is in a file. F2 writes the theme into fcmd.toml as a [[theme]] block under its own id, which the theme loader already treats as an override of the built-in of that name, so the next run starts with these colours and Shift+F12 still cycles the themes. Esc without F2 says plainly that the colours changed on the screen only.

• The mouse, behind ui.mouse in Interface settings and off by default. That default is a decision: while a terminal is reporting the mouse it stops acting on it, so selecting text with the mouse and the middle-click paste go away — the user's own tools, which this program cannot replace. Somebody who wants the mouse says so once.

  A click moves the cursor to the row and makes that panel active; past the last row it only moves the focus. A double click is Enter on the row. The right button toggles a row's selection, which is the button FAR and Midnight Commander both use for it. The wheel scrolls whatever is under the pointer, three rows a notch, without taking the focus — reading the other panel is not working in it. The key bar is clickable and presses the key written in the cell with whatever modifiers are held, so Shift and a click is Shift+F5; the menu bar opens a menu and one click on a dropdown row runs it; a dialog's list moves its cursor and a double click answers it. A click outside an open dialog does nothing at all, because it must not move a cursor nobody can see.

  Every one of those ends up in the same run the keyboard uses, so the macro recorder, the confirmations and the error reporting are the ones that were already there. Where a click lands is worked out from a layout the renderer records as it draws, which is arithmetic over rectangles and therefore tested without a terminal — including the awkward case, a brief view whose columns run down and then across.

• A dialog for Alt+F6, where there was one line and a fixed kind of link. It offers the three kinds and says what each one is for: a relative symbolic link survives the whole tree being moved or copied elsewhere, an absolute one survives the link alone being moved, and a hard link is a second name for the same bytes, which survives the original name being deleted and cannot cross a filesystem or name a directory. The choice is remembered for the next one, as the pack and checksum dialogs remember theirs.

• WebDAV panels, webdav:// and webdavs://, the netbox's third protocol. The ports are 80 and 443 when a URL does not say; the path is the one the server publishes, which on Nextcloud is /remote.php/dav/files/<user>/; a share that needs no login is reached by leaving the user out.

  The client is hand-written over reqwest, in the same shape as the object store's: WebDAV is six HTTP methods and one XML document, and a crate for it would have brought a date library and a serialiser along to do what one readable, testable file does. A listing is a PROPFIND of depth 1 asking for four properties by name — allprop would make some servers answer with a page of locks and quotas per entry — and the reader skips a property the server reports as missing, which is what keeps a directory from being shown as an empty file.

  A PUT streams: the caller writes to one end of a pipe and the request reads the other, so a four-gigabyte file is a transfer rather than an allocation. Closing the writer is the moment the upload finishes and it waits for the server's answer — a refused PUT reported as a success would be a save that silently did nothing.

  What WebDAV cannot do is refused with the reason rather than quietly skipped. A file's modification time is a live property in RFC 4918, which means the server owns it, and HTTP has no permission bits at all — so a copy onto a WebDAV panel says it could not carry the timestamp over instead of leaving the file dated now and reporting success. A MOVE is sent with Overwrite: F, so F6 onto a name that is already taken is refused rather than replacing something.

  Its tests run against a WebDAV server inside the test binary — a small HTTP server that answers the six methods, including a chunked PUT, so the URL building, the XML reading, the streamed body and the error messages are all exercised over a real socket.

• FTP and FTPS panels, in the netbox beside SFTP. ftp://me@host/pub and ftps://me@host/pub are panels; the session editor has a protocol row; the port follows the protocol when a URL does not name one, and a server offering both spellings on port 21 is two connections rather than one, because a connection is now keyed by its scheme as well as its host.

  It is the same RemoteFs trait the SFTP client implements, so everything above that line — the panel, the viewer, the editor, the job engine, the synchroniser, the finder — works on an ftp:// path without knowing that it is one. What the protocol cannot do is said once, in the capability table, rather than discovered halfway through an operation: no links, no truncate, no random write, and no cheap seek.

  Three things in it are worth knowing about:

  A transfer gets a connection of its own. FTP sends a file's bytes over a second socket and a control connection can only have one of those at a time, so holding it for the length of a download would make a listing wait — and would deadlock a copy from one directory of a server to another, which reads and writes at once. So a transfer dials and logs in again, which is what every graphical FTP client does. The password is therefore kept in memory while the connection is open; it is never written anywhere, and anonymous and ftp are not asked for one at all.

  An upload is not finished until the server says so. Closing the writer shuts the data connection and reads the reply on the control connection, and a refusal there is reported as the error it is. Skipping that is exactly how an upload comes to look successful and leave nothing on the server.

  A LIST row carries no date. MLSD is asked for first and gives the time in UTC to the second. A server too old for it answers with the text its own ls prints, where the year is missing on recent files and the time zone is never stated — so those rows are shown with no date at all. A date wrong by a year is worse than no date, because sorting by it and "only files newer than these" would both believe it.

  Times and modes travel where the server can take them, through MFMT and SITE CHMOD, and a server that has neither says so in its own words rather than quietly losing a timestamp. FTPS is explicit TLS — AUTH TLS before the password, protected data connections, the certificate checked against this machine's own authorities, which is what makes a server behind a company CA work with nothing turned off.

  The tests run against an FTP server inside the test binary: a login, both listing commands, both passive negotiations, a download, an upload, and the awkward parts of the protocol over a real socket.

• 7z, read and written, in pure Rust. Enter opens a .7z as a panel, F3 reads an entry out of it, F5 copies out, Shift+F1 builds one, Shift+F2 extracts one, Shift+F3 tests every entry, and F4/F6/F8 inside one change it — the same seven things that already worked for a zip and a tarball, now for the seventh format, with no 7z.dll and no external program.

  The format's own shape shows through in two places, and it is better to say so than to pretend otherwise. Its index is a header read in one go, so listing a 7z is as quick as listing a zip. Its files, on the other hand, are usually solid — several of them in one compressed stream — so reading one means decoding what is in front of it, and changing one means decoding and packing the rest again. A zip entry nobody touched is copied across as the compressed bytes it already is; a 7z has no such shortcut.

  What this program writes is LZMA2 with each file in a block of its own. That is larger than what 7-Zip writes by default, and it is the right trade for a file manager: the common act here is reading one file out of an archive, and a solid archive makes that mean decoding everything before it.

  An encrypted 7z — including one whose header is encrypted, where not even the names are readable — is recognised and reported as wanting a password, rather than as a broken archive. There is nowhere to type one yet, and the message says that too.

• File associations. A [[assoc]] block in fcmd.toml is a mask, a name and three commands — open for Enter, view and edit for Alt+F3 and Alt+F4 — and the first block whose mask matches the file wins. The mask is a whole name (Makefile) or *. and an extension (*.md), compared without regard to case, by the same rule the decompile rules use, so the two cannot drift apart. Commands take the substitutions the user menu and Ctrl+G take: {file} quoted, {file.raw} bare, {name}, {dir}, {other.dir}, {list}, {ask:…}.

  F3 and F4 stay ours whatever a block says, which is FAR's arrangement and the reason its alternative-viewer keys exist: a key that sometimes opened something else would be a key nobody could trust. What a block names for reading and writing is on Alt+F3 and Alt+F4, and with nothing named there either those two fall back to $PAGER and to $VISUAL or $EDITOR — already set on a machine that has an opinion.

  With no block to go on, Enter hands the file to the desktop: xdg-open, open, or cmd /c start. general.desktop_open turns that off for a machine where it is the wrong thing to do, and with it off Enter says there is nothing to open the file with rather than guessing. Archives are still checked first, so an association for *.zip cannot take away Enter on an archive.

  Open with, in the Commands menu, lists every block that matches the file under the cursor plus the desktop, and runs the one chosen — the way to use a block's view without rebinding anything.

• Synchronising two directories (Ctrl+Shift+Y, and the Commands menu). Three steps, and the middle one is the point: a dialog saying how to decide, a table saying what was decided, and only F2 setting anything going. Nothing is written before that, so the table is the whole of what is about to happen and the dry run at the same time, and every row of it can be changed first — Space walks the answers a row allows, ← and → say which way, = leaves it alone.

  One way (the left panel is the source) or both ways with the newer side winning, into the subdirectories, an offer to take out what the other side does not have, a mask, and compare the bytes for the change that a size and a time cannot see. Two seconds of slack on the times, because that is what a trip through a memory stick or a zip does to a timestamp and treating it as a change would copy everything, every time.

  Two directories both sides have are walked rather than paired — what differs is inside them — and a directory only one side has is one row, because the copy takes its tree and a row per file inside it would be a hundred answers to one question.

  There is no sync job kind: the table hands out the ordinary copies and deletes, copies first so a row that takes something away cannot run before the row that was going to replace it, queued one at a time, overwriting without asking because the table was the question. A row that takes a file out follows the wastebasket setting, as F8 does. What made it fit the existing engine is one new copy option, relative_to: with a root to be relative to, a/b/c.txt lands at target/a/b/c.txt, so one job carries a whole tree at the paths it had.

  Both sides have to be on this machine for now, and it is said before the dialog opens.

• Ctrl++, Ctrl+− and Ctrl+0 ask the terminal for a larger font, a smaller one, or the one it started with. A program in a terminal does not own its font — the emulator does, and there is exactly one control sequence for asking: xterm's OSC 50, where a # and a signed number step through the font menu. So that is what these send, and what happens next is the terminal's business. On most emulators (VTE, Konsole, Windows Terminal, alacritty, foot) Ctrl with plus or minus is the emulator's own zoom and never reaches a program at all, which gets the same result by a shorter road. The status line says the request was made, not that it was granted, because there is no reply to wait for.

  FAR's Ctrl+Gray +/− — select and unselect by the current file's extension — moves one modifier along to Ctrl+Shift++/Ctrl+Shift+−, and both are now in the Select block of the Files menu, which the keymap file already claimed and did not have.

• Checksums. MD5, SHA-1 and SHA-256 over what is selected, written in the format md5sum, sha1sum and sha256sum read — <hex> <name> — because the point of a checksum file is that whoever you send it to can check it with the tool they already have. One list for the lot, named after the directory or anything else you type, or one beside each file. Check against a list goes the other way, on the list under the cursor.

  Which hash made a list is read off the digests in it rather than off the file's name: 32 hex characters is MD5, 40 is SHA-1, 64 is SHA-256. A list is called SHA256SUMS or sums.txt or nothing in particular, and a name can lie where a length cannot. BSD's SHA256 (name) = …, which macOS and FreeBSD write, is read too.

  What does not match is named in the report and left selected in the panel, the way a comparison by content leaves what differs: the next thing one does with a bad download is fetch it again or delete it, and both of those work on the selection. Esc stops a run.

  The reading is JobFs::read_chunks, the reading half of a copy with the writing half left out, so the day a provider implements it this works there unchanged. Today the local filesystem is the one that does, and anything else is refused before the dialog opens. The three hashes were already in the tree under the SSH client, so this costs no new dependency.

• The system's own wastebasket. F8 hands what you chose to the wastebasket your desktop's file manager shows, so what goes in can be taken back out from there — the XDG trash spec on Linux, NSFileManager on macOS, IFileOperation on Windows, through the trash crate. On by default, as it is in FAR and in Total Commander: the one key everybody presses by accident is the one that should land in a safety net. Shift+Del deletes outright whatever the setting says, which is what that key means everywhere else, and Use the system recycle bin in the system settings is the setting — a row that was in that dialog, drawn dim, since the dialog existed.

  It is a job kind of its own rather than an option on a delete, because the shape of the work is different: a wastebasket takes a directory with everything in it in one operation, so there is no tree to walk and no file to count. Only this machine has one — a server, an archive and a bucket are deleted outright, and the dialog says which of the two is about to happen rather than leaving it to be guessed. If the wastebasket refuses a path it ought to have taken, the error names the key that deletes it instead.

• The folders kept to hand. Ctrl+Shift+0 to Ctrl+Shift+9 put the directory you are in on a digit and Alt+0 to Alt+9 take you back to it — ten of them, which is FAR's own number, with Alt rather than FAR's right-hand control key because no terminal can tell the two control keys apart. Ctrl+D opens the whole hotlist, Total Commander's key for it: the folders with a digit first and in order, then the rest, each with a name of its own if it was given one. It is the one list that is edited from inside it — Ins keeps the directory you are in, Del gives a folder up, F4 names it — because that is where a folder is read.

  They live in the state file rather than in fcmd.toml, because a key sets them: a shortcut that waited for Save setup and vanished without it would be a bug, not a setting. A shortcut on a server or in a bucket works like any other and opens the connection first, the same route the drive list takes.

• Tabs per panel. A panel can hold more than one directory at a time: Ctrl+Alt+T opens another tab — on the directory under the cursor if the cursor is on one, and otherwise a duplicate of this one — Ctrl+Alt+N and Ctrl+Alt+P step along the row, Ctrl+Alt+W closes one, and Ctrl+Alt+M hands one to the other panel, which is a move rather than a copy. The Left and Right menus hold all of it, and Name this tab.

  A tab is a panel, and that is the whole design: everything a tab has to remember is already what a panel remembers, so a side's tabs are a list of panels with one of them on screen — and the one on screen is deliberately not in the list, because a parked copy of it beside the live one would be a second answer to where the panel is. Switching a tab is a move rather than a copy, whatever the directory holds.

  Ctrl+Alt+K locks a tab to its directory. A locked tab refuses to move whichever way it is asked — Enter, the history, the tree driving it from the other side, a plugin — and says why rather than doing nothing; the one thing that takes the lock off is the connection under it closing, because a tab cannot keep a promise about a directory it can no longer reach.

  The row is drawn only by a panel that has more than one tab: a bar that was always there would cost every panel a row of files to say that it has one tab. Tabs are kept between sessions, with their names and their locks; the directory the shell was in still wins for the tab one lands on, unless that tab is locked.

  The keys are the Ctrl+Alt row and not FAR's, because FAR has no tabs and the two keys this once wanted are taken: Ctrl+T is the tree panel and Ctrl+Tab steps between the open screens. Ctrl+Alt with an arrow is avoided because most desktops switch workspaces with it, and Ctrl+Alt+L because most of them lock the screen.

  Still to come: reordering a tab within its row, and a list of them to pick from.

• A real terminal (Ctrl+Alt+E). The command line under the panels runs a command and keeps what it printed; this runs vim, top and ssh. It is a pseudo-terminal — openpty on Unix, ConPTY on Windows — so the program asks the system what it is talking to and gets the answer it needs: it is told the size, told again when the window changes, and draws with the escape sequences it would send to any terminal.

  Those sequences go through a VT parser into a grid of the same type the panels draw into, so putting a terminal on the screen is a copy and the colours a program asks for are the ones the backend already knows how to send. What is implemented is what a shell, a pager, an editor and a full-screen monitor actually emit: cursor movement, erase in display and in line, insert and delete characters and lines, scrolling regions, the SGR attributes with 256-colour and 24-bit colour, save and restore, autowrap, the title, and the alternate screen — which is what makes vim leave the shell's output alone when it exits.

  It is a screen like the viewer: Ctrl+Alt+E again parks it with the program still running, F12 lists it and brings it back, and pressing the key from the panels reuses a parked one rather than starting a second shell. Inside it every key belongs to the program and there is no key bar, because one offering our keys in there would be a lie. [term] shell names what to run; empty means the shell the session already uses.

  Still to come: scrollback one can scroll (the lines are kept, nothing shows them yet), searching the output, and the mouse.

Fixed

• Ctrl+↑ made the panels taller. It brings their bottom edge up, so they get shorter and the command output underneath gets the rows; Ctrl+↓ gives them back. The keys were right and the sign behind them was not: panel.height(N) now means the panels' height, which is what the keys read as, rather than the number of rows they give up.

[0.3.0] — 2026-10-25

An archive and a bucket stop being read-only windows, a .md file opens as a document, and the two dialogs that had the least to say — the copy prompt and the missing attributes one — say what the engine underneath them could already do.

Fixed

• Three tests were written in the shape of Unix and had been failing on Windows: a path like /tmp/x is relative there, where a path with no drive letter is; the dialog-scrolling test assumed the attributes dialog is twenty rows tall, which it is only where there is a mode to offer; and it looked for the file's name as the dialog's first row and found the panel's row of the same name behind it. Reading them again turned up one real limit, now documented: a folder's own times cannot be set on Windows through the standard library, so they are left alone rather than reported once per folder.

Added

• Writing into an archive. An archive is no longer a read-only window. F4 on an entry opens it in the editor and saving puts it back in; F6 renames an entry or moves it to another directory inside the same archive; F8 takes entries out, the selection included and a directory with its tree; and F5 or F6 into an archive — with the other panel standing inside one — put files in, F6 deleting the originals once the archive is written. It works for zip and the whole tar family (plain, gzip, bzip2, xz, zstd).

  None of these formats can be edited in place, so a change means writing the archive again, and the mechanism is the honest one: the old archive is streamed into a .part file beside it with the change applied, the result is opened and checked against what was asked for, and only then does it replace the original. An interrupted change — a full disk, Esc, a crash — therefore leaves the archive exactly as it was and a .part file to delete. Entries nobody named are copied across as the compressed bytes they already are, so taking one file out of a hundred-megabyte zip is a copy and not a recompression. It reports as a job, with a progress bar and Esc, and the archive cache is dropped either side of it so no panel answers from a stale index.

• The copy dialog (F5, F6). The one-line prompt became a dialog, and every row below the destination is something the engine could already do and the prompt had no way to ask for: what to do if the file is already there (ask, overwrite, overwrite when the source is newer, skip, give the copy a free name, add to the end of it), only files newer than the ones there as a box of its own beside that choice, a mask so only the matching names travel, whether to copy what a link points at instead of the link, and whether to keep the times and the permissions. The defaults are the prompt's behaviour exactly, so typing a path and pressing Enter does what it always did; the answers are remembered for the next dialog.

  The destination line takes several destinations, ;-separated and quoted when a name contains one. They run one after the other, and only the first of a move is a move — deleting the source after it would leave the second destination nothing to carry. A cancelled or failed destination drops the rest.

  The mask applies to files and never to directories, and a directory is planned only once something under it has matched: copying *.rs out of a tree gives the directories that have Rust in them and no others, which is the difference between a filtered copy and a copy followed by a cleanup.

• The attributes dialog (Ctrl+A). What a file is, rather than what is in it: on Unix the mode as twelve boxes — owner, group and world × read, write, run, plus setuid, setgid and sticky — with the line above them saying what it is now (rw-r--r-- (0644)); on Windows its four bits instead; read-only on both, because on Unix it is the write bits. Then the modification and access times, and, with a folder among what is selected, and everything inside the folders.

  It reports like a copy, with a progress box, a count and Esc, and a file that refuses is listed with its reason instead of being passed over — which is why this is fcmd_jobs::attrs and not JobFs::apply_meta: that one is a copy's best effort and swallows what it cannot do, which is right after a copy and wrong when somebody has just ticked a box. A directory is changed after its contents, so taking the write bit off one cannot put its own contents out of reach halfway through. A file on a server gets the mode and the modification time, which is what SFTP carries; an entry in an archive and an object in a bucket have nothing to set and say so.

• Ctrl+A is therefore the attributes dialog, as it is in FAR, and select-all moved to FAR's own Shift+Gray + (Shift++), with Ctrl+Shift+A beside it for terminals that do not report Shift with a printable key. Deselect-all is Shift+-.

• A dialog taller than the screen scrolls to the cursor, with a mark on the frame where a scrollbar would be. The attributes dialog has twenty rows on Unix, and a terminal of twenty-four lines would otherwise have drawn its last rows below the bottom of the screen, where no key could reach them.

• Writing to object storage. A bucket is no longer a read-only window. F5, F6, F7 and F8 work on one as they do anywhere else, with the same dialog, progress bar, overwrite question and Esc, and F4 edits an object and saves it back. A copy into a bucket is an upload streamed off the disk; a copy out of one is a download written straight to the file; a copy between two keys of the same service is done by the service, so the bytes never come through here.

  The engine knows nothing about object storage: fcmd_s3::jobs::ObjectFs wraps the job filesystem the way the archive layer does, takes the s3:// paths and hands everything else through. What the protocol cannot do is said rather than faked — there are no directories (F7 writes the empty slash-named object every console uses to show an empty prefix), a rename is a copy and a delete and therefore not atomic, and an object carries only the time the service wrote it, so a copy into a bucket does not preserve a file's modification time. A service configured without credentials still reads and nothing more, and its rows say so.

• Markdown laid out to be read. A .md file opens in the viewer as a document rather than as its source: the marks come off and the space they held is put to use. A heading is bold with a rule under it, a list is bullets with hanging indents and a task list is boxes, a quote gets a bar down its side, a link shows its text and its address, a fenced block is indented and — where the fence named a language — coloured as that language, and a table is drawn with box-drawing characters, its columns lined up and aligned as its delimiter row asked. Shift+F2 switches between the document and its source, Shift+F4 has it in the ring with the text, the dump and the hex, and Interface → Markdown laid out to be read decides which of the two the first screen is.

  It is the one mode that reads the whole file, because a table's columns cannot be worked out from the part of it on screen; over four megabytes a file stays its source and says so. Searching a laid-out document searches what is on screen rather than the marks behind it, so a word in a table is found in its cell.

• fcmd-syntax gained of_language, which turns a language's name into a syntax — what a fenced code block's info string says — where of_name turns a file name into one.

• The interface settings now have the two colouring switches that were only in the file: Colour the languages we recognise and Markdown laid out to be read.

• A path typed into a dialog may now name a place inside an archive (/home/me/a.zip!/src), which is what the other panel's directory reads as when that panel is inside one.

[0.2.0] — 2026-10-24

Buckets in a panel, and the chrome of the thing finally looks like what it is modelled on. Object storage browses by prefix, so a bucket of 1.7 million objects opens as fast as one with ten; the panels wear FAR's double frame, its column rules and its foot; the key bar follows the modifier you are holding; the editor and the viewer colour twenty-five languages; and F1 now answers the question people actually ask it, which is what the keys do here.

Added

• The key bar follows the modifier. Hold Shift and the bar becomes the archive keys — Add, Extrct, ArcCmd, Edit…, Copy, Rename, Delete, Save, Group, SelUp; hold Ctrl and it becomes the sort keys; hold Alt and it becomes the drives, the link, the search and the two histories. The words are FAR's own, in all seven languages, and the bar is built from the keymap rather than written out, so it cannot promise a key that is bound to nothing — a keymap of your own is described correctly for free. A terminal has to speak the keyboard protocol for this (kitty, foot, WezTerm, Ghostty and others do); where it does not, the bar simply stays as it was.

• F1 is about where you are. It opens the keys of the screen you pressed it on — the panels, the viewer, the editor, the hex editor, a dialog — each with a sentence saying what it does, grouped by subject, generated from the keymap as loaded and from the commands' own descriptions. A binding of your own appears there with the right words next to it, and a key nobody bound appears nowhere. Right goes on to the chapter that explains that screen at length, Esc to the table of contents, and leaving the help puts you back where you were rather than on the panels.

• The search dialog (F7), in the viewer and the editor, is FAR's: what to look for, whether it is text, hex or a regular expression, whether case matters, whether only whole words count, and then Find next or Find previous — the same question asked in two directions. It opens filled in with what was asked last. Whole words is new in the engine too, for both the viewer and the editor and for plain text and regular expressions alike: it is the difference between finding set and finding offset.

  Enter now answers a dialog wherever the cursor is, as it does everywhere else and as it does in FAR; Space is what turns a box on and off.

• Syntax highlighting, in the editor and the viewer, for Rust, C, C++, Java, C#, JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Go, shell, SQL, HTML, XML, CSS, Markdown, JSON, TOML, YAML, INI, Make, Dockerfile, Lua and Perl. It is a scanner rather than a parser, and deliberately: it knows how a language writes a comment, a string and a number plus the words anyone would call keywords, which colours real files correctly without a grammar per language.

  The editor keeps the state each line starts in and extends it as you scroll, throwing it away from the first line an edit touched — so closing a comment uncolours the lines below it in the same frame, and a file of a million lines costs only what is on screen. The viewer starts at the top of the window, because it never reads more of a file than it shows; a comment opened above the window is not carried, which is what buys opening a forty-gigabyte log instantly. The editor's status line names the language.

  Each class is a syntax.* theme key and every built-in theme defines all of them in its own palette, foregrounds only, so a coloured run never changes the page behind it. ui.syntax = false turns the whole thing off.

• The change-drive dialog is a table (Alt+F1, Alt+F2), as it is in FAR: every row says what the thing is — disk, removable, optical, network, memory — what it is called, what it is formatted as, how big it is and how much is left, read from the real mount table rather than guessed. The things that are not filesystems come underneath, numbered 0 to 9 the way FAR numbers its plugin panels, and the number takes the row. Mounts that are part of how the system runs (/proc, /sys, /dev, /run) are left out: a tmpfs under /run is plumbing, while a tmpfs someone mounted on /mnt/fast is a choice, so where a thing is mounted decides and not what it is.

• The panels can be resized. Ctrl+← and Ctrl+→ move the line between them, Ctrl+↑ and Ctrl+↓ take rows off both and give them to the user screen — the output of the last command, right there under the panels, which is what those keys are for in FAR. The split is a percentage so it survives a resize of the terminal, neither panel can be squeezed below ten columns, and both numbers are settings (panel.split, panel.height_cut) that Shift+F9 keeps.

• The archive commands menu (Shift+F3) — MultiArc's ArcCmd. On an archive, or inside one: test it, extract it here, extract it elsewhere, delete it, or add files to a new one.

• Testing an archive. Every entry is read and decompressed and the bytes are thrown away; what the format checks, it checks — a zip's CRC, a decompressor's own framing. It reports as a job, so there is a progress bar, Esc stops it, and the entries that failed are listed with the reason each one gave. A compressed tar is walked once rather than reopened per entry.

• Shift+F1 can delete the originals once the archive is written. It is a box in the dialog, off by default, and the deletion happens only if the pack really finished: a pack that failed or was stopped leaves every file where it was.

• Shift+F11 and Shift+F12 toggle directories first and selected files first, which are FAR's Group and SelUp.

• Object storage in the panels. s3://logs/2024/08/ opens a bucket as a tree of prefixes, on AWS or on anything else that speaks the protocol — MinIO, Ceph, Garage, R2, Wasabi, a LocalStack in a container — with the endpoint, the region and the addressing style named in an [[s3]] block of fcmd.toml. s3://work@bucket/ picks a service by name and s3://work@/ lists the buckets it can see.

  A bucket has no directories: 2024/08/13/access.log is one key with slashes in it. What the panel shows as a folder is a common prefix, which the service computes, so opening a prefix costs one request whether the bucket holds a thousand keys or ten million. Asked for everything under a prefix instead, the listing really is the whole bucket and it stops at listing_cap rows (100 000 by default) — and when it stops the footer says (partial) for as long as that listing is on screen, with a line saying why. SPEC 04 §8 has the measured numbers for a bucket of 1.7 million objects, since that is the question this started from.

  No access key is stored in fcmd.toml, ever: a block says where its keys come from, and they are read from the AWS_* variables or from ~/.aws/credentials, the file every AWS tool shares. credentials = "anonymous" signs nothing, for a bucket with a public read policy. TLS is rustls — one implementation on every system, and no OpenSSL to find — but the trust anchors are the machine's own, because an S3-compatible endpoint inside a company is usually a MinIO or a Ceph behind that company's certificate authority, and a root list bundled into the binary cannot be told about it. The signature is AWS Signature Version 4, HMAC-SHA256 over a canonical request, and it is tested against botocore — the library the AWS command line signs with — on a frozen clock, one of those vectors being the worked example AWS publishes the signature of.

  F3 on an object brings it down to a temporary copy and shows that, the same path a file on a server takes, with net.fetch_limit_mb as the ceiling — so the viewer's seeks, its hex mode and the disassembler all work on it. Objects are read-only in this release: the provider claims READ | SEEK | CASE_SENSITIVE and nothing else, so nothing in the UI offers to rename an object (object storage has no rename), set permissions on one or write to one. F5 from a bucket to a local panel is not wired to the job engine yet, and that — with upload, delete and server-side copy — is the next increment.

• Six more example plugins, taking the folder to twenty-one and thirty-three commands: dir-sizes (every folder here measured and ranked, where FAR's Ctrl+Space does one at a time), line-count (lines by extension under here, skipping node_modules, vendor, target and the rest of what nobody wrote by hand), syntax-check (does this parse? php -l, python -m py_compile, node --check, JSON, ruby -c, sh -n, perl -c, chosen by what the file is), env-diff (which keys .env is missing from .env.example — names only, never values, because a secret in a dialog is a secret in a screenshot), ssh-hosts (what ~/.ssh/config already knows, Include followed, Host * left out) and strip-bom (the three bytes that put a blank line before <?php, found and taken off, with the file's mode kept and the result checked by looking again rather than by trusting the loop).

• Tunnels over the netbox connection (F9 → Commands → Open a tunnel…, or net.tunnel from the palette): 8080:db.internal:5432 makes this machine's 8080 reach db.internal:5432 as the server sees it — SSH's direct-tcpip, the thing ssh -L is built on, over the session the panel is already using. No second authentication, no second host-key check, no second connection: one more channel on the one that is open. db.internal:5432 uses the same port on both sides and a bare 5432 means the server's own. The local end binds 127.0.0.1 and not every interface, because a tunnel is the server's network handed to this machine and binding it everywhere hands it to the office; Tunnels… lists what is open with the connections carried, open now and refused by the far end, and Enter closes one. Tested against a real SSH server in the test process, with a real service at the far end: the channel, the copying both ways, the counters, the port freed on close, and a far end that refuses without taking the session down.

• Compare by content (F9 → Commands), beside FAR's own compare folders. That one matches names and compares size and time, which is instant and right nine times out of ten; this one reads the files. Every pair with the same name is opened on both sides and the bytes are compared — a pair whose sizes already differ is settled from the listing without opening anything, the rest are read until the first byte that differs — and what differs is selected on both sides, along with anything that has no counterpart at all. It is the question to ask about two trees built from the same source, or copied by something that did not keep the timestamps, where the date proves nothing. No hashing: a hash reads every byte of both files and then compares thirty-two, while this stops at the first difference, and a hash can collide where a comparison of the bytes cannot be wrong. The reading happens on a worker thread with the progress in the status line, and Esc stops it.

• Screenshots, in docs/shots, drawn by the renderer itself rather than photographed: the real panels are rendered into a cell buffer and the buffer is written as SVG, so regenerating them is one command and they cannot show a version of the program that no longer exists.

Fixed

• Three example plugins did not run on macOS, and the build said so: in bash 3.2, which is the bash macOS has shipped since 2007, a case written inside a $( … ) does not parse — the ) of the first pattern closes the substitution and the error lands on the ;;, on a line that looks perfectly fine. A newer shell parses it, so sh -n here could not see it. The case has moved into a function in two of them and become a plain test in the third, and a new test reads the scripts for the shape rather than parsing them, so this cannot come back on a machine the test suite does not run on.

Changed

• reqwest stays at 0.12, and the bot's upgrade to 0.13 is refused — by the build rather than by an opinion. In 0.13 the rustls support is built on rustls-platform-verifier, which carries webpki-root-certs: the Mozilla root data again, under CDLA-Permissive-2.0, which is the licence this crate was moved off webpki-roots to avoid in the first place. It is not an optional dependency there, so no combination of features gets round it, and cargo deny refuses the tree. Worth revisiting when rustls-platform-verifier stops carrying it.
• A provider may now say that a listing is not all of it, through the new Dir the panel reads directories with. Nothing local changes — a local directory is always read whole, and list still answers with the rows alone for the job engine, the finder and the dialogs. Listing::truncated existed since the first release and was read by nobody; it now means something and is shown.
• Ordering a panel by name is about twice as fast, and three times with selected-first on, which matters on a directory or a prefix with a hundred thousand rows in it. The comparison now works on the bytes of a name instead of validating every name as UTF-8 twice per comparison, skips the head two names share with a word-at-a-time comparison, and answers "is this row selected" once per row rather than hashing it on every comparison.
• Two names that differ only in how a number is padded — img2 and img02, 0 and 00 — no longer compare equal. They are different files, and an order that called them equal left the two rows wherever the sort happened to drop them. The padding decides, but last.

[0.1.1] — 2026-10-24

Three things found by reading 0.1.0's own code an hour after cutting it. Two of them could lose work, which is why this is a release of its own rather than a line in the next one.

Added

• Assigning a recorded macro now asks how it should play: once, or once for every selected file. The second mode existed in 0.1.0 and could only be chosen by editing the file by hand, which is a mode nobody finds. once is the first row, so the ordinary answer costs one keystroke and Esc means the same thing rather than throwing the recording away.
• An example plugin, examples/plugins/git-here: a manifest naming one command and a shell script that answers it, saying which branch the panel's directory is on. "A plugin command is a process" is a sentence; a script one can read in twenty seconds is the explanation. A test loads it the way the binary does, because an example that does not work is worse than no example.

Fixed

• F12 lost the screen it was drawn over. The screens list replaced whatever was in front with itself, so pressing it while reading a file dropped the viewer — and with an editor in front, an afternoon's unsaved work with it. It parks the front screen now, the way the block menu parks the hex editor: Esc brings it back, choosing the panels sends it to the background, choosing another screen swaps them. And a question asked over a viewer belongs to that viewer, so F12 from a search prompt lists the viewer as the screen in front instead of showing the panels and hiding the viewer from its own list.
• A macro recorded in the editor was stored as a panel macro. The documentation said the scope is where the recording started and the code wrote panel regardless, so a run of editor keys ended up on a panel key where its steps mean something else entirely. The scope is taken when recording starts now, which is also the right moment for a second reason: stopping a recording is itself a keystroke, and by then one may be looking at something else.
• --list-plugins said "(0 items)" for a plugin that provides a command: it counted the declared TOML blocks, which such a plugin has none of. It counts what a plugin actually brings now, data and commands separately.
• Sixteen message ids were translated into all seven languages and shown by nothing. There was already a test that every id the code asks for exists in every language; the other direction is now a test too, because that is the one that catches a catalogue growing a tail of text the program no longer matches.

Notes

• 0.0.8 has no release, and the changelog says so where its section is: the tag never happened, and everything in it reached users in 0.1.0. The workflow that cuts a release now says why it cannot when it cannot, instead of timing out.

[0.1.0] — 2026-10-24

The first release meant to be used by somebody other than its author: macros, the screens, a real help system, a manual page, and the first thing a plugin can do beyond carrying data.

Added

• Macros (Ctrl+. records, Ctrl+Shift+. lists). A macro is a list of commands, not of keystrokes: every action in the program is already a named command, so a recorded macro is a readable list of names in fcmd-macros.toml that one can read, edit, diff and carry to another machine. What a key cannot say as a command is kept as a key — the letters typed into a prompt, Enter on a dialog — and recording tells the two apart by where the key went. The corner of the screen says REC and counts the steps while one is being recorded; the key pressed afterwards is the key the macro answers to, which is how one finds out it is free. Two play modes: once, or once for every selected file with the cursor put on each in turn — the mode that makes a macro worth recording. Anything that copies, moves, deletes, packs, overwrites or runs a shell command asks first and shows the steps, unless the file says trusted = true.
• The screens (F12, Ctrl+Tab). A viewer or an editor is a screen one steps away from and comes back to, keeping its position, its search and its unsaved changes while the panels or another file are worked on. F12 lists them with a * in front of one holding unwritten changes; the count of what is behind the panels sits in the corner. The panels are screen zero of the ring, so Ctrl+Tab from a screen steps out to them and from them steps in to the next: the panels are never more than one key away. F10 from the panels now asks about every background screen with unsaved changes instead of ending the program on the spot.
• A help system worth the key (F1). A table of contents: seven written chapters — what this is, the panels, files, the viewer, the editor, servers, configuration — compiled into the binary from docs/help/, and three generated ones: every binding by scope, every command with the keys that reach it, and the settings as this session has them. The generated half is built from the keymap actually in force, so it cannot drift; a written list of keys is wrong the day after it is written.
• A manual page, docs/fcmd.1, generated from the command line's own options with the sections clap cannot know about written underneath, and shipped in the release archives. A test fails when the committed page and the binary disagree, so a flag cannot exist without a line in the page.
• Plugin commands (F11) — the first plugin tier that does something rather than carrying data. A plugin declares a [[command]] and the host runs it: deliberately a process, so one artifact works on every platform, there is no sandbox to get wrong, and a plugin that crashes crashes alone. It runs on the worker pool with the context as JSON on standard input and the same facts in the environment, and answers with one action per line. An action that runs something names a command of our vocabulary, so everything a plugin can do a key can do too. A command id outside the plugin space, a program that leaves the plugin's directory, or a context nobody can give is refused at load rather than at the first press.

Fixed

• The manual-page test failed on Windows and only there, because the checkout converts line endings. .gitattributes pins the data the program reads with include_str! to LF, and the comparison ignores the endings anyway.
• The tag workflow waited half an hour for a CI run it was not allowed to read: reading whether CI passed is an Actions read, and a job with an explicit permissions block gets only what it lists. It says so immediately now instead of timing out, and a dispatch can name the commit a missed release was cut at.

Notes for the first testers

Everything is a file you can read: fcmd --paths says where they are, fcmd --dump-config prints the settings as the program has them, and fcmd --check-keymap says whether a keymap is sound. F1 is the manual, F9 names every dialog with its key, and the key bar always says what the function keys do right now.

What is deliberately not here yet is written down rather than left to be discovered: docs/BACKLOG.md is the list, each line with the reason it is a line and not a feature.

[0.0.8] — 2026-10-24

Not published as a release. The tag never happened: the workflow that cuts one waited half an hour for a CI result it was not allowed to read, and by the time that was fixed the branch had moved on. Everything below reached users in 0.1.0 instead, which is why there is no v0.0.8 on the releases page. The section stays because it says what was built and when.

The Hiew track: a hex editor with a patch list, block operations, an assembler, a calculator, search by instruction pattern, and raw devices. The one thing deliberately left out is a compiler — see below for what the assembler does and does not do.

Added

• Hex mode of the editor (F4 on a binary, Alt+H either way). A piece table over the file, so an edit costs nothing at the front of a terabyte and the length can change without rewriting what follows. The two panes are the bytes and the text; Tab moves between them and both type. Changed bytes are drawn as changed until they are written, with a patch list beside them — offset, old byte, new byte — and the editor's own Ctrl+Z/Ctrl+Y over the whole session. F2 saves atomically: a part file beside the original, synced, then renamed over the top, and the buffer reopens clean. It is in the editor and not the viewer on purpose: the viewer's read-only contract is exactly what lets it seek through a 40 GB file.
• Block operations (F3 marks, F12 operates): write the block out to a file, read a file in, fill with a byte or a repeating pattern, exclusive-or with a key, copy or move bytes from elsewhere in the same file, insert zeros, delete. Each one says what the file's length will be before it happens, because the failure of a hex editor is a file that is quietly one byte wrong. The exclusive-or is named for what it is and not for security.
• An assembler (F9) for the instructions a patcher types: no operands, register to register, register and a number, one register, and a branch written as the address to arrive at rather than as a displacement — the shortest form that reaches it, unless short or near says otherwise. The architecture comes from the file's own header, so a 32-bit PE is assembled as 32-bit code on a 64-bit machine. Everything encoded is decoded again by the disassembler before the dialog shows it, so what appears is the instruction the processor will see. Memory operands are refused by name: mov [rbx+rcx*4+8], eax needs a full ModRM and SIB parser and brings exactly the addressing-mode mistakes a patcher cannot afford. The hex pane is still there for bytes nobody can spell, and the backlog carries the parser.
• A calculator (Alt+=): one line of arithmetic answered in decimal, hex, octal, binary and as characters at once, with the bitwise and shift operators and literals in every base the tools around it use (0x1f, 1Fh, 0b1010, 0o37, 'PE'). The same parser reads the numbers typed into the assembler and the block operations, so a number means one thing everywhere in the program.
• Search by instruction pattern (F7 over a disassembly). The query matches what the disassembler prints, not the bytes: nobody looking for a call wants the four letters of it to appear in the file. * stands for whatever lies between the pieces of a pattern, so mov *, eax finds every move into that register, and the operands' column padding is collapsed first so the pattern does not have to know about it. Shift+F7 and Alt+F7 walk on as they always did.
• Raw devices on Linux and macOS, read-only. A block device is a file, but stat reports it as zero bytes long and the viewer believed that; the length is measured by seeking to the end instead, which the kernel answers without reading anything and which needs no ioctl and no C dependency. A device opens read-only, the status line names it and the size it measured, and the bytes are written out to a file rather than back over the disk — an atomic save renames a new file over the old one, and there is no such move onto a disk. Windows needs its own path and is on the backlog.

Fixed

• Esc out of the block menu, or out of a question one of its operations asked, dropped the hex editor along with every unsaved patch in it. It goes back to the editor now.

[0.0.7] — 2026-10-24

A fix release: 0.0.6's tree panel could hang, and it went out before the build on the other two platforms had finished saying so. The Hiew track moves to 0.0.8.

Fixed

• Ctrl+T could spin for ever on a path the tree could not find a row for — which on macOS was most paths, because /tmp, /var and /etc are symbolic links and the tree only showed real directories. The tree now shows a link that points at a directory, and the loop that opens its way towards the current directory is a loop that cannot spin: every turn either opens a row that was closed or gives up looking. It gives up when the deepest row it can see is already open and the path is still not under it — a name spelled differently by the filesystem, or a directory that has gone since.
• The archive dependencies brought in a licence our own policy did not list: libbz2-rs-sys carries Julian Seward's own bzip2 licence rather than one of the usual names. It is BSD-style permissive and both Debian and Fedora treat it as free, so it is in deny.toml's allow-list with a line saying exactly that, and in THIRD-PARTY.md with the same.
• actions/checkout to v7, upload-artifact to v7 and download-artifact to v8, which have to move as a pair.

[0.0.6] — 2026-10-24

The panels FAR has and we did not, and the view modes to go with them.

• Quick view (Ctrl+Q): the viewer's own rows inside a panel's frame, following the other panel's cursor — so text, a hex dump of something binary and the search machinery are the same code the reader uses. The file is opened once and kept while the cursor stays on it. A directory says what it is (measuring one is F3's job) and a file whose bytes are not local says that F3 brings them out, because a preview that copies a file down on every cursor movement is a trap.
• Info panel (Ctrl+L): where the other panel is, what kind of place that is — this machine, a server, inside an archive, a list of files — the free space, what the directory holds, what is selected, and the row under the cursor. Everything shown is already known: nothing is read from the disk to draw it.
• Tree panel (Ctrl+T), with the directory cache that makes it bearable: rooted where the other panel's path starts and opening its way down a level per read until the cursor is on the directory that panel is showing. It is the one special kind that takes the focus, because moving its cursor is how it changes the other panel's directory. →/Enter open a branch, ← closes it or climbs, * opens everything under the cursor up to two thousand rows, and Ctrl+R forgets a branch and reads it again. The cache outlives the panel, so leaving the tree and coming back costs no reads.
• All three sit in the passive panel and the key that turns one on turns it off, as in FAR.
• Ctrl+L is settled: it is FAR's info panel in both keymap profiles, and the change-directory dialog moves to Ctrl+Shift+L — a key it can afford now that cd works on the command line.
• Compare folders (Commands menu): names, sizes and times, no subdirectories and no contents, which is what makes it instant. Each panel keeps selected what the other does not have or has in an older version, so what stays selected is what a copy would have to carry.
• FAR's five view modes on FAR's keys: Ctrl+1 brief (three columns of names), Ctrl+2 medium (two), Ctrl+3 full, Ctrl+4 wide (name and size, two columns), Ctrl+5 detailed. Ctrl+3 and Ctrl+4 therefore mean something different than they did in 0.0.5, which is the point: a FAR user's fingers are the specification. A mode now says how many columns it draws and whether it shows a size, so a column too narrow for what it holds falls back to fewer columns.
• Left and Right move by a column in the multi-column views, as they do in FAR, and do nothing in the one-column views — also as in FAR.
• The four view modes FAR has beyond ours (descriptions, long descriptions, owners, links), its alternative full view, the deeper folder comparison, and the key tabs will need now that Ctrl+T is the tree's are all lines in docs/BACKLOG.md.

[0.0.5] — 2026-10-24

Archives: a panel can be inside one, and a key puts files into one.

• A path can point inside a container, in the syntax SPEC 04 §4 specifies — /home/mb/src.zip!/doc/readme.md, and nested. Every path operation works on the innermost level, and .. at the root of an archive leaves it, because an archive root has a parent and so is not a root. Two archives are two providers, and so are an archive and the directory it sits in: that is what stops a copy out of one being planned as a rename.
• fcmd-arc reads zip and the tar family — plain, gzip, bzip2, xz and zstd — and builds all six. Every decoder and encoder is pure Rust, so the binary stays one file that cross-compiles without a C toolchain. The format comes from the bytes first and the name second: a zip called .epub is still a zip, while only the name can say that a gzip stream has a tar inside it.
• Enter goes into an archive and everything that works on a panel works in there: the sort, the selection matrix, F3 (which brings the bytes out to a temporary file, the same shape as fetching a remote file) and F5, which copies out through the ordinary job engine with its conflicts, progress and cancellation.
• Shift+F1 builds an archive out of what is selected, offered in the other panel and named after the one item or the directory, in any of the six formats with three compression levels. A name the user typed wins over the format row. It writes to a sibling .part and renames it into place, so a cancelled pack leaves no half-built archive where someone will later trust one.
• Shift+F2 extracts into a directory of its own, named after the archive without its extension — a hundred files straight into a panel is nobody's intention. It is an ordinary copy job with one new option, which copies what is inside each source rather than the source itself.
• The zip-bomb guards of SPEC 04 §4 are [arc] in the config file: entry count, unpacked total, the ratio to the archive's own size, and the nesting depth. A refusal names the limit that fired and what the archive asked for, because a user who meets one has to decide whether to raise it. An entry whose name climbs out of the archive is pinned at its root rather than trusted.
• What is inside an archive cannot be changed yet and says so in all seven languages: that is the rebuild of SPEC 04 §4, with an archive inside an archive and an archive on a server beside it in docs/BACKLOG.md.
• The release archives are now fcmd-<platform>-<version> and hold the files at their root, with no directory of their own.

[0.0.4] — 2026-10-24

Finding things: a search worth the name, and a panel that can hold what it found.

• A panel can be a list of files rather than a directory. One method decides whether a row's path is the panel's own path with the name on the end or something the panel was told, and every operation, the viewer, the editor and the metasymbols go through it. A list panel re-reads by asking about its own paths again, so a file deleted since the list was built drops out; Enter on a row goes to the directory the file lives in; navigating away turns the panel back into a directory.
• Find file (Alt+F7): masks in the filter grammar, text or a hex pattern, case sensitivity, whole words, files that do not contain it, five scopes, following symbolic links, folders in the results. It opens on the last search. Results stream into a list that is usable while the walk runs — Enter goes to the file, F3 reads it, F5 turns the results into the panel, Esc stops the search and keeps what it found.
• The engine is its own crate (fcmd-find), so the dialog does not know how a walk works and the walk does not know what a panel is: the dialog makes a plain specification, and one place turns it into a query. Progress is throttled rather than sent per file, and the directories a walk cannot read are collected and capped instead of announced one by one — a search over a whole drive meets them by the dozen.
• Replace across files: its own job over the selected files, with the needle as text, a pattern or hex bytes. The dry run is not optional — the confirmation says how many matches in how many files by running the same engine that then writes, so what it promises and what it does cannot disagree. A rewritten file is left looking modified.
• The documentation says what is not in this first version rather than half-building it: searching inside archives, code pages, the size and date conditions, and saving a search are lines in docs/BACKLOG.md.

[0.0.3] — 2026-10-24

A command line, and the keys a FAR user reaches for without thinking.

A command line, and the screen it writes on

• A command line under the panels (ui.command_line): everything printable goes to it once it has anything in it, and to quick search while it is empty — FAR's rule, so neither habit gets in the other's way. Word jumps break on the separators a path uses, Ctrl+K cuts to the end, and the history walks with Ctrl+↑/Ctrl+↓ keeping the half-typed line safe.
• Commands we run ourselves, because a commander that shells out for cd cannot keep the panel in step: cd/chdir (with ~, - and a remote panel's own notion of a path), cls, set, pushd/popd/clrd, title, exit, and if [not] exist / if [not] defined conditions, nestable.
• Prefixes: view:, edit:, goto:, whereis:, and run: with its output to a file, the screen, or nowhere.
• Metasymbols (SPEC 06 §5): FAR's !.!, !, !`, !\, !@!, !&, !?title?init! and the side prefixes, plus our own {named} forms, quoted per platform. An unrecognised {…} passes through untouched, so awk '{print $1}' still works, which is the whole reason for the rule.
• The user screen (Ctrl+O): what the commands printed, scrollable, capped, with each command as its heading.
• Command history (Alt+F8) as a list, and a small on-disk store that keeps it, the folder history and both panels' directories between sessions.
• Ctrl+G applies a command to every selected file, each file taking its turn as "the current file". They run in sequence rather than all at once, counted through in the status line, and the run stops at the first failure instead of pushing ninety-nine more over a broken one.

The keys a FAR user reaches for

• The selection matrix: the modifier picks the criterion, not just the action. Ctrl++ and Ctrl+− take everything with the extension of the file under the cursor, Alt++ and Alt+− everything with the same name whatever its extension, Alt+* inverts folders too. One restore (Ctrl+Shift+M) undoes a whole sweep rather than one row.
• Shift+F5, Shift+F6, Shift+F8 act on the item under the cursor whatever is selected — the case they exist for is a selection you forgot about. The list travels with the dialog, so selecting something else while it is open cannot widen the copy.
• Ctrl+F1 / Ctrl+F2 give the screen to one panel, and the focus goes with it.
• Ctrl+F8 / Ctrl+F9 sort by creation and access time. An entry whose filesystem does not keep the field sorts with the others that do not, at the old end, so the order stays total.
• Alt+Del wipes: the bytes are overwritten once, then the file is unlinked. The dialog says plainly what that cannot promise on an SSD, on a copy-on-write filesystem or with snapshots — including that the name survives in the directory and the journal.
• Alt+F6 creates a link in the other panel, as a copy would: a relative symbolic link, the one that survives the tree being moved elsewhere. The engine does hard and absolute links too; the chooser is still to come.
• Long names scroll sideways with Ctrl+Shift+←/→ (FAR's Alt+←/→ is history here).

The panel's own frame

• Free space on the device at the right-hand end of the bottom frame — the one thing that needs a platform call, and honest about saying nothing on a server or on Windows.
• A scrollbar in the right frame, drawn only when there is more than fits.
• The panel's own status line (panel.status_line), a rule and a row inside the frame with the item under the cursor. Off by default, because the screen-wide status bar says the same thing and two rows saying it wastes a row.

One filter object

• The quick filter bar now takes the whole grammar: a comma or semicolon list, *, ?, [c-f] ranges, /regex/i, an exclusion after |, and named groups (<arc>, <temp>, <exec>, nestable). A bare word still means "contains", so nothing anybody was already doing changed.
• It is one value type rather than three, the way FAR has it, and it already carries the conditions the find tool and the copy dialog will need: size ranges with binary and decimal suffixes, date ranges that can be relative in days, attributes as three states, and a hard-link condition. A mask that does not parse leaves the previous filter alone instead of flickering the panel empty.

The viewer says what a binary is

• Structure pane (F11): beside the hex or disassembly rows, a pane that decodes the file — identity (format, architecture, bitness, kind, entry point), the header field by field with its raw bytes next to its meaning, and then the tables: ELF sections and segments, PE sections, Mach-O load commands and dylibs, the slices of a universal binary, the members of an ar archive, plus an ELF's interpreter and build id. Tab moves the keys between the bytes and the pane, Enter on a row takes the bytes to that offset.
• Imports and exports: an ELF's DT_NEEDED libraries and its .dynsym symbols with their binding and type, the PE import and export directories including forwarders and exports with no name at all, Mach-O's load-dylib commands and symbol table. The .NET CLI header too, with the runtime version, the flags in words, the entry-point token and the metadata root — and the identity line then says a PE is managed.
• Symbols feed the disassembly, and Enter on a call or jmp follows it, Backspace comes back, with the jumped-from stack on screen.
• It reads only the offsets that matter: an ELF keeps its section table at the end of the file, and our own 162 MB debug binary is decoded in four reads rather than loaded.
• Every offset is range-checked before it becomes a jump target, every table is capped, and a file that stops early fills the rows it can and says truncated — a corrupt binary is the normal case for this pane, not an error.
• A hex row now fits the window: never more bytes than the setting, never fewer than four, always a power of two so an offset stays aligned, and the structure pane takes the room left over instead of cutting the printable gutter in half.
• F6 crosses to the editor on the line the bytes were showing, and F6 in the editor crosses back to the byte the cursor was on. + and − walk to the next and previous file of the panel without going back to it, skipping directories and keeping the mode. Ctrl+F10 brings the panel to whatever is being viewed. Decompiling moved to Shift+F6, since FAR's F6 in the viewer means the editor.

Jobs

• Speed, elapsed and what is left in the progress box. All three come from the average rather than the last tick, and the estimate is absent until there is enough to compute it: a number that jumps between four seconds and four hours is worse than no number.
• Append and only newer as copy policies, beside ask / overwrite / skip / rename.
• Fixed, and it was a data-loss bug: a move plans a copy and then a removal of every source, and the removals ran whatever happened to the copy. Answering "skip" to a conflict in a move left the destination alone and deleted the source. The runner now declines the removal of any source whose copy did not happen, and of any directory above it.

Plugins

• fcmd-plug: manifests discovered from disk, with themes, keymaps, associations, decompile rules and mask groups loaded from them, a version requirement checked against ours, and every path inside a plugin verified to stay inside it — relative, no .., and the canonical target inside the canonical directory, so a symlink cannot walk out either.
• --list-plugins says what was found, what is waiting for a host API, and what was refused and why.

The screen looks like FAR's

• A far theme: FAR Manager's own default palette, element for element, read from far/palette.cpp and far/colormix.cpp of FarGroup/FarManager (BSD-3-Clause). Light cyan on blue panels, yellow for marked files and column titles, a cyan bar on the active panel's path, cyan menus with yellow shortcuts, light grey dialogs with cyan input fields, red warning dialogs.
• Column titles (Name │ Size │ Date Time) under the panel frame, with the sort-mode letter in the top-left corner — lower case for ascending order, upper case for descending — and a * beside it while a filter is on, exactly where FAR puts them. panel.column_titles turns the row off; with it off the sort mode goes back to the footer.
• The active panel's path is drawn inverted, as FAR draws it.
• Menus have their own colours instead of borrowing the dialog's: a dropdown is cyan with yellow shortcuts and a black selection bar, and the bar across the top is black on cyan.
• Shadows. Dialogs, menus, lists and the progress window darken two columns to their right and one row below, which is FAR's DropShadow geometry. The shadow halves what is already there rather than painting a colour, so it works in every theme and in 16 colours.
• Four things that were not FAR's, checked against its source and corrected: the key bar's background between the labels is grey on black rather than the label's cyan; the totals turn yellow on cyan while something is selected; file colours are FAR's six default highlighting groups in FAR's order, so a hidden directory is cyan rather than white and *.bak is litter-coloured; and the size column says Up and Folder, localised and centred the way FAR fits them, instead of UP-- and FOLDER. Nothing is bold any more either: FAR draws with console attributes, which have no bold.
• Every theme gained the keys those changes need (menu, menu bar, dialog fields and buttons, warning dialogs, column titles, the active panel's title, the scrollbar, the key bar's background, the selected totals, the <temp> group) — all seven built-in themes define every key, and a test keeps it that way.
• The key bar now uses FAR's own wording where FAR ships the language: UserMn, MkFold, ConfMn, and their Italian, German, Spanish and Russian forms.

Also

• Quoting on Windows was wrong: the backslash was in the set of characters that need quoting, which is right on Unix (it escapes the next one) and wrong on Windows (it is the path separator) — so every path a metasymbol expanded came back wrapped in quotes, which cmd then reads differently. Each platform has its own set now.
• A panel can be a list of files rather than a directory: one method decides whether a row's path is the panel's own path plus a name or something it was told, and every operation goes through it. Nothing reaches it from the keyboard yet — it is what find results and panelize will be shown in — but it is in this build.
• Four tests that only held on Unix now hold on both platforms, and one that needed a Windows privilege no longer insists on it.

Documentation

• docs/04-far-inventory.md: FAR 3.x read from its own repository — 283 help topics, 311 settings keys — with every feature marked against what we do, the three grammars worth matching exactly (panel columns, file masks, metasymbols), and a section on exactly how close the screen now is and what is still different.
• docs/02-features.md §5b: Hiew release VIII's published feature list, item for item, against what we have — what is shipped, what is in the backlog, and the two we are not doing.
• docs/spec/02-panels.md §9b (what FAR draws in a panel's frame and what each element costs), docs/spec/06-tools.md §7.3 (the four decisions apply-command had to take), and docs/spec/10-menus-and-dialogs.md for the menus and the dialogs.
• Three facts corrected in docs/03-keymap.md and one in the backlog, now that the source rather than the documentation is the reference.

[0.0.2] — 2026-10-24

The menus. Everything the keys do can now be found by reading, which is the half of FAR that makes it learnable.

Menu bar (F9)

• FAR's five menus — Left, Files, Commands, Options, Right — with ←/→ between them, ↑/↓ over the entries, a letter to pick one, and a √ on the view mode and the hidden-files setting the panel is actually in.
• Left and Right act on their own panel whichever one has the focus, as FAR's do.
• Every entry is a command from the same vocabulary the keys use, so there is no behaviour reachable only from a menu, and the shortcut shown beside an entry is read from the keymap in force — rebind it in fcmd.toml and the menu says the new key.
• An entry whose feature is not here yet stays in the menu, drawn dim, and says not implemented: <command> when chosen: the menu is a map of the program, and a map with the gaps marked beats one that lies. A test stops those entries from advertising a key that already does something else.

Settings dialogs

• System, Panel, Interface and Confirmations. Every row is bound to a configuration key and goes in through Config::set — the same code path as --set key=value — so a dialog cannot write something the file format does not accept.
• OK (or F10) applies to the running panels at once: no restart, nothing to save first. Esc keeps nothing.
• Save setup (Shift+F9) writes fcmd.toml as the configuration now stands, themes that came from the file included. What it writes parses back into the same configuration.

Lists to choose from

• Languages — switches the whole interface on the spot — and themes.
• Drives, mount points and open connections (Alt+F1 left, Alt+F2 right): the platform's roots plus every live sftp:// connection, and a configured-but-closed site connects first.
• Folder history per panel (Alt+F12).
• Sort modes (Ctrl+F12), where choosing the order already in force turns it round, the way FAR does it, unless panel.allow_reverse_sort says otherwise. Ctrl+Shift+F12 reverses directly.

Netbox session editor

• Alt+N then Ins/F7 stores a connection, F4 edits the one under the cursor: name, host, port, user, authentication (SSH agent, key file or ask), key file, remote folder, group, keep-alive, compression. Connections no longer need fcmd.toml to be edited by hand.
• It is validated before it is stored — a host is required, port and keep-alive must be numbers, the key authentication needs a file, and the result has to be a site the netbox can use. A dialog that cannot be applied stays open with the reason in the status line.
• No password or passphrase is ever a field: a session says how to authenticate and the secret is asked for when the connection needs it.

Also

• The dialog framework gained text rows with a real caret and the editing keys.
• New commands: app.themes, app.languages, app.setup.save, opt.system, opt.panel, opt.interface, opt.confirmations, panel.sort.menu, panel.drive(left|right), panel.history.
• Two new settings: panel.allow_reverse_sort and general.confirm_overwrite.
• 105 new messages in each of the seven languages.
• docs/spec/10-menus-and-dialogs.md specifies all of it; docs/BACKLOG.md lists what is specified but not built, with the open questions marked — including the two keys where we differ from FAR today (Ctrl+A is select-all here, Ctrl+L is change-directory).

0.0.1 — 2026-10-24

The first release anyone can download. It is a preview: the parts that are here are tested and behave, and what is missing says so instead of failing quietly.

Panels and navigation

• Two panels, keyboard-first, with the FAR key layout (mc is the second shipped profile).
• Brief, full, detail and wide views; sorting by name, extension, size, date or unsorted, with natural ordering, directories first and a second press to reverse.
• Navigation with history (Alt+←/Alt+→), parent, root, Ctrl+L to type a path, quick search by typing, Alt+I for a live filter, Ctrl+H for hidden files, Space for a recursive directory size, Ctrl+= to send the other panel here.
• Selection by Ins, by mask (+, -, *), invert and restore, with totals.

File operations (F5–F8)

• Copy, move, create directory and delete, planned before anything is touched: the planner counts files and bytes and refuses the impossible (a directory into itself, a file onto itself) before the first write.
• A copy is written beside its destination and renamed into place, so a crash or a cancel never leaves a half file; a move deletes the source only once the destination is there, and a move on the same filesystem is a rename, so it copies nothing.
• Conflicts and errors are questions, not guesses: overwrite, overwrite if newer, skip, rename, and the …All variants; retry, skip, skip all or cancel on an error.
• Progress with per-file and total bars, cancellable at every step.

Viewer (F3)

• Text, dump and hex on files of any size — position is a byte offset, so a 40 GB log opens in one read.
• Encoding detected (UTF-8, UTF-16 with or without a BOM, CP1252, CP437) and switchable; no-wrap, character and word wrapping; search (plain, regex or hex pattern) with highlighted hits; go to offset or percentage; follow mode; bookmarks.
• F5 shows the code inside a compiled file: ELF, PE, Mach-O and raw x86/x86-64 disassembled with sections and symbols, Java class files and .NET assemblies read in process, WebAssembly printed as its text format. F6 hands anything else to an installed decompiler through a [[decompile]] rule.

Editor (F4)

• The file's encoding, line ending, BOM and final newline survive a round trip; the save is atomic, and a file changed on disk is never overwritten without a confirmation.
• Stream blocks and column blocks, grouped undo and redo, search and replace, go to line:column, bookmarks, auto-indent, line operations.
• Shift+F4 edits a new file.

Netbox: SFTP (Alt+N)

• A panel can sit on a server. One connection per user@host:port is shared by both panels and every job, so F5 and F6 copy and move up, down, between two servers or inside one, with the same progress and conflict handling as a local copy.
• Host keys are checked against known_hosts: an unknown one is shown as a fingerprint for you to accept, and a changed one is refused.
• Authentication through the SSH agent, a key file, or a password asked for in a masked prompt. Nothing is stored: [[site]] blocks say only how to authenticate.
• F3 views a remote file through a temporary copy; F4 edits that copy and F2 writes it back, uploaded beside the original and renamed into place.

The rest

• Six themes (commander, black, white, matrix, tron, blade) and seven interface languages (English, Italian, German, French, Spanish, Russian, Simplified Chinese).
• One executable: themes, keymaps and languages are compiled in. The only files on disk are fcmd.toml (if you want one) and an optional plugins folder.
• Non-interactive modes for scripts and CI: --list-themes, --list-commands, --list-languages, --check-keymap, --export-theme, --dump-config, --paths.

Not here yet

Archives, the trash (F8 deletes permanently), the command line and the user screen, the menu (F9), find files (Alt+F7), FTP/WebDAV/S3, the plugin host, syntax highlighting, several open editor buffers, tabs, the diff viewer and the background job queue. Anything unimplemented says so rather than doing nothing.