DockDuck is the native macOS file manager Finder should be — fast, beautiful, and 100% Swift. Tabs, dual-pane, a pinned Start dashboard, tags, instant search, batch rename, and connect to servers(SFTP/SMB) — all in one window that opens the moment you click. Pay once, no subscription. Your files never leave your Mac.
Hey Product Hunt 👋 I'm Martin, the solo developer behind DockDuck.
I've lived on a Mac for years, and Finder always felt… stuck. It barely changes, and every "alternative" was either a powerful-but-dated power tool, or an Electron app that ate my RAM and battery just to list files.
I wanted something that felt like Apple made it — fast, native, genuinely beautiful — but with the power features I actually reach for: dual-pane, connecting to servers, batch rename, tags, and a pinned dashboard for the stuff I open every day.
So I built DockDuck. 100% Swift and AppKit, zero Electron. It opens instantly, stays out of your way, and your files never leave your Mac. And it's pay-once (or yearly) — no subscription, because I'm tired of those too.
It's a free 14-day Pro trial, no card needed. And for the PH community, PRODUCTHUNT21 takes 10% off any plan until Sept 30.
This is an early launch and I'm building it in public. I'd genuinely love your feedback on what would make DockDuck your daily file manager — and I'm happy to talk about how it's built, the design decisions, any of it. 🦆
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congrats on shipping this solo, the "zero Electron" framing is doing a lot of work and honestly for a file manager it should - I've quit using more than one "modern Finder" alternative purely because it lagged scrolling a folder with a few thousand files. curious about the SFTP/SMB piece though - when you save server credentials, are those going into the macOS Keychain or do you roll your own storage for that? that's usually the detail that decides whether I trust a new file manager with my actual server logins or just use it for local stuff.
@galdayan Thanks! And good question - it's the real macOS Keychain, not my own storage. Each saved server gets a standard generic-password Keychain item (you can see them in Keychain Access under app.dockduck.server), stored with when-unlocked accessibility so they're not readable pre-unlock after a reboot. The connection metadata (host, user, port) lives in app preferences, but the password never gets written there, even if you paste a full sftp://user:pass@host URL, the password portion is split off and goes straight to the Keychain. Saving the password is also optional; you can just get prompted each time.
Rolling my own credential storage would've gone against the whole premise of the app - the point of zero-Electron/all-native is that you get to lean on the platform's security primitives instead of reinventing them.
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Hey @mnemosynee Martin, I have quietly resented Finder for years and long since stopped expecting better, so watching someone finally give it a proper rival feels good.
@jean_noel_escande Thank you =), that's exactly the itch that started this. I kept waiting for Finder to get its "Apple redesigns their own app" moment and eventually decided to stop waiting. If there's a Finder frustration you've been quietly carrying for years, I'd genuinely love to hear it, those grudges make the best feature list.
DockDuck
Hey Product Hunt 👋 I'm Martin, the solo developer behind DockDuck.
I've lived on a Mac for years, and Finder always felt… stuck. It barely changes, and every "alternative" was either a powerful-but-dated power tool, or an Electron app that ate my RAM and battery just to list files.
I wanted something that felt like Apple made it — fast, native, genuinely beautiful — but with the power features I actually reach for: dual-pane, connecting to servers, batch rename, tags, and a pinned dashboard for the stuff I open every day.
So I built DockDuck. 100% Swift and AppKit, zero Electron. It opens instantly, stays out of your way, and your files never leave your Mac. And it's pay-once (or yearly) — no subscription, because I'm tired of those too.
It's a free 14-day Pro trial, no card needed. And for the PH community, PRODUCTHUNT21 takes 10% off any plan until Sept 30.
This is an early launch and I'm building it in public. I'd genuinely love your feedback on what would make DockDuck your daily file manager — and I'm happy to talk about how it's built, the design decisions, any of it. 🦆
congrats on shipping this solo, the "zero Electron" framing is doing a lot of work and honestly for a file manager it should - I've quit using more than one "modern Finder" alternative purely because it lagged scrolling a folder with a few thousand files. curious about the SFTP/SMB piece though - when you save server credentials, are those going into the macOS Keychain or do you roll your own storage for that? that's usually the detail that decides whether I trust a new file manager with my actual server logins or just use it for local stuff.
DockDuck
@galdayan Thanks! And good question - it's the real macOS Keychain, not my own storage. Each saved server gets a standard generic-password Keychain item (you can see them in Keychain Access under app.dockduck.server), stored with when-unlocked accessibility so they're not readable pre-unlock after a reboot. The connection metadata (host, user, port) lives in app preferences, but the password never gets written there, even if you paste a full sftp://user:pass@host URL, the password portion is split off and goes straight to the Keychain. Saving the password is also optional; you can just get prompted each time.
Rolling my own credential storage would've gone against the whole premise of the app - the point of zero-Electron/all-native is that you get to lean on the platform's security primitives instead of reinventing them.
Hey @mnemosynee Martin, I have quietly resented Finder for years and long since stopped expecting better, so watching someone finally give it a proper rival feels good.
DockDuck
@jean_noel_escande Thank you =), that's exactly the itch that started this. I kept waiting for Finder to get its "Apple redesigns their own app" moment and eventually decided to stop waiting. If there's a Finder frustration you've been quietly carrying for years, I'd genuinely love to hear it, those grudges make the best feature list.