Everything Scout can do.

Install

Scout is free and open source. It needs macOS 26 or later and runs on Apple silicon and Intel Macs.

1. Download Scout.zip and open it. Safari usually unzips it for you, leaving Scout.app in Downloads.
2. Drag Scout into your Applications folder.
3. Open Scout. The first time, macOS says it can’t verify the app. Click Done.
4. Open System Settings ▸ Privacy & Security, scroll to Security, and next to “Scout was blocked to protect your Mac” click Open Anyway. Confirm with your password or Touch ID.

First launch

A welcome card shows the three things worth knowing on day one. Then macOS asks whether Scout can see your Downloads, Desktop and Documents folders. Click Allow: it’s a file browser, so it needs to.

To skip those questions entirely, give Scout Full Disk Access in System Settings ▸ Privacy & Security, the same as other file browsers.

Make Scout your file browser

Two switches in Settings ▸ Keyboard & System (⌘,) hand everyday file browsing to Scout:

• Use Scout for “Show in Finder”. When another app reveals a file (“Show in Finder”, “Reveal in Finder”), it opens in Scout. Apps notice after they restart.
• Open folders in Scout. Folders opened from Spotlight, a browser’s downloads, other apps or Terminal’s open command open in Scout, each in a new tab.

Turn on Open at login too, so ⌥Space is always ready.

Updating

Download the newest Scout.zip and replace the old app in Applications. Your settings, favorites, workspaces and history stay put. See what’s new in each build. If you built Scout yourself, run git pull && ./scripts/install.sh.

The window

Scout’s window has three parts, and you can hide either side.

Previews in the info panel include images, PDFs you can scroll, video, rendered Markdown and highlighted code. Press Space for a full Quick Look.

Find anything

Press ⌥Space in any app, or ⌘K inside Scout, and type a few letters. Press it again or Esc to go back to what you were doing.

• Folders come from a private index on your Mac, ranked by how often and how recently you visit them. “pro inv” finds “Projects/Invoices”.
• Files come from Spotlight, by name or by what’s inside them.
• Filter with the chips: Folders or Files, Any Kind, Any Time, and In this folder to search only where you are. ⇥ cycles All, Folders and Files.
• ↵ opens, ⌘↵ opens in a new tab or shows the file in Scout, ⇧↵ shows all results in a tab, where you can save the search to the sidebar.
• from: and part of a site or sender finds downloads by where they came from: syllabus from:canvas.depaul.edu.0.3
• Type > to run any command, describe a file and press ⌥↵ to Ask Scout, and find screenshots by the text in them.0.3

Other ways to get somewhere

Views, tabs and split view

Three views

⌘1 list, ⌘2 icons with real thumbnails, ⌘3 columns. In the list, → and ← open and close folders in place (add ⌥ for everything inside). Right-click the column headers to add Kind or Tags. ⌘+ and ⌘− change icon size.

Selecting

Arrow keys move the selection in every view. Hold ⇧ with the arrows, or ⇧-click, to select a range; ⌘-click adds or removes one item. Type the start of a name to jump to it.

Tabs

⌘T opens a tab, ⌘W closes it, ⇧⌘] and ⇧⌘[ switch. Tabs and splits come back after you quit.

Split view

⌘D shows two folders side by side, each with its own tabs. ⌥⇥ switches pane, ⌘U swaps them, and F5 / F6 copy or move the selection to the other pane.

Move, copy and drag

• Drag onto a folder to move into it (another disk copies; hold ⌥ to copy). Hover over a folder for a second while dragging to open it and drop deeper. Dragging several selected files moves them all.
• Move to… without dragging: press ⇧⌘M, type a few letters of the destination, press ↵. ⌥⇧⌘M copies instead, and ⇥ switches between the two.
• Copy and paste: ⌘C, then ⌘V to paste a copy or ⌥⌘V to move it here.
• Shelf (⌥⌘S): collect files from several folders, then Copy Here or Move Here in one go.

When a name is taken, Scout asks Replace, Keep Both or Skip. Big copies show progress with Cancel, and moves to another disk check the copy before removing the original.

Tags, favorites and workspaces

Group, tidy and Recents

• Group By (⌃⌘0–8): split a folder into blocks by kind, name, size, date added, modified or created, or tags. Scout remembers it per folder. To group every folder the same way, pick one in Settings ▸ Browsing ▸ Group folders by; a folder’s Sort menu can still override it, and Use Default Grouping hands it back.0.3
• Tidy Folder (⌥⌘T): sorts loose files into folders such as PDFs, Images and Installers. You see the plan first, and ⌘Z undoes it.
• Recents (⌥⌘R): everything you opened or downloaded in the last 30 days, grouped by day.
• Hidden files: ⇧⌘. shows them for one tab.

Rename many files

Select files and press Return (one file renames in place). Build the new names from steps that run in order, and watch every name change in the preview before you apply it.

Variables

Type them in any step, or pick them from the { } menu. Dates take a format, like {created:yyyy-MM-dd}, and text takes :lower or :upper. Write {{ for a literal brace.

Presets

Save any set of steps as a preset. Five come built in: Web-friendly names, Date + number, Remove “copy” and numbers like (1), Lowercase extensions and Smart names0.3. Scout flags names that clash or would be hidden before you apply, and can number clashes for you.

Clean Up

⇧⌘K shows how much space is free and what you could free up. Each category explains what it is; the safe ones come ticked, and the ones marked Your call are for you to decide.

• Developer caches and installers left in Downloads
• Old downloads, large files and screen recordings
• Duplicates: exact copies of files over 1 MB (the original is kept)
• Old node_modules, Mail attachments, leftovers from deleted apps, and apps you haven’t opened in six months

Everything you pick goes to the Trash, so nothing is gone until you empty it.

Archives and Quick Actions

• Compress and Extract Here (right-click): zip items, or unzip .zip, .tar (.gz, .bz2, .xz) and .7z.
• Quick Actions (right-click): convert or resize images and combine PDFs. Originals are kept.
• New folder ⇧⌘N, new text file ⌃⌘N, copy path ⌥⌘C, make alias ⌃⌘A, AirDrop ⇧⌘R, and Finder’s Get Info ⌥⌘I.

Settings

Open with ⌘,.

What’s new in 0.3

Scout 0.3 adds everything in this part, and anything marked 0.3 elsewhere on this page. If you have an older Scout, download the new one and replace it. See the changelog for the full list.

Triage Downloads0.3

Press ⌥⌘J (or Triage Downloads under Tools) to go through new downloads one at a time, with a big preview. Each file takes one key:

Suggestions learn from where you put similar files before: the same site, words in common, or the same type. For example, “6 PDF files from canvas.depaul.edu went here”. Turn on Always do this (A) when you file something, and Scout makes a rule: new downloads like it go to that folder on their own while Scout is open. Each one shows in History, so you can undo it, and rules can be switched off or deleted on the Triage page.

To triage any other folder, open it and choose Go ▸ Triage This Folder.

History0.3

Press ⌥⌘Y to see everything Scout moved, copied, renamed or trashed, grouped by day. Unlike ⌘Z, it’s kept after you quit, for a year.

• Where did that file go? Type part of its name: Scout says what happened to it and where it is now, even if its folder moved later.
• Show takes you to it; Undo puts things back, even from days ago. If a file has moved since, or something new took its old place, Scout tells you rather than guessing.

Files that arrived since your last visit to a folder get a small dot, and the footer counts them.

Ask Scout and smart names0.3

On Macs with Apple Intelligence, Scout uses Apple’s on-device model. Nothing leaves your Mac.

• Ask Scout: describe a file in ⌘K, like “the lease I signed last spring” or “screenshots of error messages”, and press ⌥↵. Scout turns it into a search (words, a kind and dates) and shows what it understood, with a way back to your own words.
• Text in images: Scout reads the text in your newest images and screenshots in the background, so ⌘K finds them by what they say. Files that are only in iCloud or OneDrive are skipped.
• Smart names: in Rename Items, the {about} variable (or the Smart names preset) names each file by what’s in it. Files it can’t read keep their names.

Commands and your scripts0.3

Type > in ⌘K to search every command in Scout’s menus and run it with ↵. Commands that don’t apply right now are dimmed.

Your own scripts go in ~/Library/Application Support/Scout/Actions/ (⌘K ▸ Open Actions Folder makes it, with an example). Each appears in ⌘K and under right-click ▸ Run Action, gets the selected files as arguments, and runs in the folder you’re looking at. Shell, Python, Ruby, JavaScript and AppleScript run with their usual interpreter. What a script prints is shown when it finishes.

More in the info panel0.3

Compare folders0.3

Open two folders side by side (⌘D), then View ▸ Compare Folders…. Scout lists files only on one side, newer on one side, or different, including subfolders. Check contents reads files whose dates differ to see if they really changed.

Copy to Right → or ← Copy to Left copies new, newer and different files across after showing what it will do. Newer files on the receiving side are never overwritten, and replaced files go to the Trash. To make the two folders match exactly, also move the receiving side’s extra files to the Trash.

Cloud buckets0.3

Buckets ▸ Add Bucket… in the sidebar connects Cloudflare R2, Amazon S3 or other S3-compatible storage. For R2, use the endpoint https://<account>.r2.cloudflarestorage.com and region auto. Scout tests the connection before saving, and keeps the secret key in your Keychain.

A bucket opens as a page: go into folders, Download (to the other pane’s folder in split view, otherwise Downloads), Upload… or drop files on it, and make or delete folders. In split view, F5 uploads the selection into a bucket on the other side. Deleting from a bucket is permanent, so Scout asks first.

Disk Map0.3

Go ▸ Disk Map, or Disk Map next to “What takes the space” in the info panel, shows what fills a folder as blocks sized by space. Click a folder to go in, use the path bar to come back out, hover for sizes, and right-click to show, open or trash something.

Keyboard shortcuts

Press ⌘/ in Scout to see them on screen. You can change 52 of them in Settings.

Find and go

Files

Tabs, panes and view

Tools

The full list, including every navigation shortcut, is in SHORTCUTS.md.

scout:// links

Any app, script or shortcut can control Scout with links. Try one in Terminal:

open "scout://open?path=~/Downloads"

Shortcuts app and menu bar

Scout adds actions to the Shortcuts app and Siri: Open in Scout, Open Workspace, Jump, Recents, Clean Up and Tidy Downloads.

The menu bar icon has Jump, your latest downloads, favorites, workspaces, Recents, Clean Up and the Shelf. Turn it off in Settings.

The scout command

Scout ships a command-line tool inside the app. Link it onto your PATH once:

mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
ln -sf /Applications/Scout.app/Contents/Helpers/scout ~/.local/bin/scout

Then:

# cd to the best-matching folder, like zoxide
cd "$(scout jump proj)"
# ranked matches, the same ranking as ⌘K
scout rank proj --json
# open the current folder in Scout, in a new tab
scout open . --new-tab
# rebuild the folder index
scout index
# duplicate files (no folder means your whole home)
scout duplicates ~/Desktop

Raycast

The raycast folder in the repository is an extension with Jump to Folder and Open Finder Selection in Scout. It needs the scout command above and Node.js. From a clone of the repository:

cd raycast && npm install && npm run dev

Stop it with ⌃C; it stays installed in Raycast.

Developer tools

Turn on Settings ▸ Developer tools (it’s off for new installs) for:

Build from source

Building Scout yourself skips the “Open Anyway” step, because macOS trusts apps built on the same Mac. You need macOS 26, Xcode 26 or later (free, several GB) and Homebrew. No Apple developer account.

1. Set up Xcode once. Open it so it finishes installing, quit, then:

   sudo xcode-select -s /Applications/Xcode.app
   sudo xcodebuild -license accept

   Copy
2. Get the code and build.

   brew install xcodegen
   git clone https://github.com/jackpawlik26/scout.git
   cd scout
   ./scripts/install.sh

   Copy

The script builds Scout, replaces /Applications/Scout.app, opens it and links the scout command. To update, run git pull && ./scripts/install.sh in the same folder. Troubleshooting, building a specific release and more are in the full build guide.

Privacy and your data

Scout has no accounts, analytics or tracking. Only two things go online: Packages, which asks Homebrew and npm whether updates exist, and buckets you add yourself, which talk only to the storage you connected. On-device AI runs on your Mac. Everything else stays in ~/Library/Application Support/Scout/:

Uninstall

First turn off Open folders in Scout and Use Scout for “Show in Finder” in Settings, so folders open in Finder again. Then quit Scout and drag it from Applications to the Trash. To remove its data and settings too:

rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/Scout ~/.local/bin/scout
defaults delete com.jackpawlik.scout