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Your files, finally connected

FilDOS is an open-source, AI-native file browser for your PC. It replaces Finder and Explorer with a fast, keyboard-first file manager — then adds a layer of on-device intelligence: search by meaning, chat with your documents, and see how your work connects. Everything runs locally. Nothing leaves your machine unless you explicitly connect a cloud drive.
The FilDOS file browser

The FilDOS file browser — grid view with cloud drives, tags, and Canvas in the sidebar.

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Why FilDOS

Cloud file-AI products require you to upload your files to use AI features. Every document, photo, and note you hand over teaches someone else’s model and sits on someone else’s servers. FilDOS runs the other way around: the app, the index, and the models all live on your personal machine. Embeddings, search, the knowledge graph, and the assistant chat are computed on-device. The whole thing is MIT licensed, so the privacy story is something you can read in the source, not something you have to take on faith.

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What you can do

File Management

List, grid, and gallery views with resizable columns, inline rename, drag-and-drop, an undo stack, and live filesystem watching.

Tags & Recents

Colour-coded tags and a persistent recents list, stored in SQLite — they follow files through renames and moves.

Search by Meaning

Ask for “receipts from tax season” or “photos from the Japan trip.” Text, code, PDFs, DOCX, and images (via CLIP) are all indexed on-device.

Ask AI

Chat with your files through an on-device LLM that can mention files, run searches, and act on your data — with your approval.

Canvas

A GPU-rendered knowledge graph of your files, built from embedding similarity, extracted entities, and temporal sessions.

Your Clouds, One Window

Browse Google Drive and Dropbox alongside local folders, through the same interface.

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Design principles

Offline-first. Every feature works without a network connection. AI embeddings, the reranker, the knowledge graph, and the assistant chat all run on-device — no API keys, no telemetry. Fast by default. The file list is virtualised, thumbnails are cached, the background indexer is duty-cycled around your activity, and search fuses keyword and vector retrieval so results feel instant. Secure by construction. The renderer runs in a sandboxed contextIsolation environment. It never touches the disk directly — every operation goes through a typed IPC contract. Result-typed IPC. Every filesystem call returns { ok: true; data: T } | { ok: false; error: { code, message } }. Expected failures (permission denied, file not found) surface as friendly toasts, never uncaught exceptions.

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Technology

Ready to try it?

Head to the Quickstart to build and run FilDOS from source.