jFile NLP - just ask.
Natural-language file management for macOS - describe what you need and jFile finds it.
A dual-pane file manager that understands what you're looking for. Describe the files you need in plain English - or speak your query - and jFile translates your intent into powerful searches across local drives, external volumes, and network shares.
🗣️ Natural Language Search
Combine more than a dozen search dimensions in a single plain-English query - no syntax to memorize.
How it works: queries are interpreted on-device by Apple Intelligence (Foundation Models framework), with a deterministic Swift parser as fallback that cross-checks the model's output. An extensive grammar-conservation test suite guards against combined queries being silently narrowed.
Search by
- Name - starts with, ends with, contains, exact match, or several patterns OR'd together (wildcards supported)
- File type - 60+ formats, including images both raster and vector
- Size & date - ranges and relative terms; by date created, modified, or added
- Content - text inside the file, via Spotlight
- macOS tags & Finder colors, Finder comments, and folder path
Dimensions combine naturally - e.g. “large PDFs named ‘report’ modified last month containing ‘Q4’” runs as one query.
Works everywhere
The same engine searches local drives, external volumes, and every mounted network share - SMB, FTP/SFTP, WebDAV, NFS, Dropbox, and S3 - with consistent kind-matching even where macOS carries no native file-type metadata.
Example Queries You Can Use
🖼️ Search inside images
Index a folder first via Edit → Index for Graphic OCR Search.
Column Filter Dropdowns
Beyond NLP search, interactive dropdown filters narrow results by Name (extension presets, wildcards), Size, Modified date, Kind (Folder, Document, Image, Audio, Video, Archive, Application), Attributes (hidden, system, read-only), and Finder color tags.
🎤 Voice Search
Dictate your query hands-free with on-device macOS Speech Recognition. Your spoken words fill the search field - then press Search (or Return) to run it. Perfect for when your hands are full or you're working across the room.
🧠 On-Device AI Insights
Select any document and jFile reads it on your Mac to surface a concise summary, automatic tags, and related files - a green On-Device badge confirms nothing ever leaves your Mac.
How it works: Apple Intelligence, Vision OCR, and the Natural Language framework, all running locally on the Neural Engine.
- Reads almost anything - photos, scans, and image-only PDFs via Vision OCR; Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OpenDocument, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, legacy
.doc, RTF, HTML, and plain text - Transcribe audio & video - right-click → Transcribe to Text for on-device speech-to-text
- Inline Writing Tools - optionally proofread, rewrite, and summarise text right inside jFile's editable fields. Off by default - you turn it on in Settings → General, where jFile explains what may be sent to the cloud. *
- Shortcuts - ask “Find Documents in jFile” through App Intents
* Apple Writing Tools - the one exception to on-device processing. Writing Tools (proofread, rewrite, summarise) is off by default: you switch it on yourself in Settings → General, where jFile explains exactly what may leave your Mac before you enable it. It works only on the text you select, never whole files. For longer or more complex requests, Apple Intelligence may process that selected text in Apple’s Private Cloud Compute rather than on your Mac. Apple does not publish a fixed size limit and decides per request; Apple states this data isn’t stored or made accessible to Apple. Leave it off and everything in jFile - natural-language and voice search, OCR, image recognition, and document Insights - runs entirely on-device.
🖼️ See Inside Your Images
Spotlight can find a file by its name. jFile finds your images by what's written inside them and what they actually show - computed entirely on-device with Apple Intelligence, Apple's Vision framework, and a bundled image classifier. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is tracked.
- Read the text inside images (OCR) - receipts, screenshots, whiteboard photos, scanned forms, signs, and slides become searchable like any document. Find “invoice”, “boarding pass”, or a phrase you photographed on a slide and the matching images surface instantly.
- Find images by what they show - jFile recognizes roughly a thousand kinds of objects and scenes - dogs (and breeds), horses, saddles, guitars, bicycles, food, plants, documents, screenshots - plus people, barcodes and QR codes, and the subject’s dominant color. Just ask: “pictures of dogs”, “images of saddles”, “photos of guitars”.
- Colors, categories, and exclusions - stack modifiers and carve out what you don't want: “pictures of black dogs”, “animals except dogs”, “screenshots with text”, “black dogs except puppies”. Broad categories work too - “animals” finds your dog, cat, horse, and bird photos, because jFile understands a golden retriever is a dog is an animal. Plurals just work.
- You choose what gets indexed - a single dialog lets you index the current location (new images, or rebuild the folder), all volumes in one pass (granting access to more drives on the spot), or just selected folders - even straight from a search result.
- Built for big libraries - indexing shows a live count as it scans, can be canceled any time from the status bar, and a gentle background pass keeps the index current while your Mac is idle and on power.
- Find similar images - right-click to filter a folder to the original plus only its visual look-alikes (Vision feature prints), with a live match count - ideal for near-duplicates, resized copies, and icon size variants
- Extract text from any image - right-click → Extract Text to File to OCR a single picture into an editable, savable window
👁️ Preview Almost Any File
Click a file and it opens right in the preview panel. jFile previews 183 explicitly-listed file types - and 21 of them are professional formats macOS can’t preview on its own: CAD drawings, layered design documents, and Illustrator / EPS / QOI artwork.
How it works: jFile leans on the system’s own ImageIO and Quick Look engines for everything macOS already understands, then adds its own pure-Swift renderers for the formats macOS skips - reading each file’s embedded preview or decoding it directly, entirely on-device, with no third-party libraries.
| Category | Formats | Previewed by |
|---|---|---|
| Raster images | 70 | macOS |
| Plain text & code | 40 | macOS |
| Office, iWork & OpenDocument | 20 | macOS |
| CAD & drafting | 14 | jFile |
| Audio | 13 | macOS |
| Video | 8 | macOS |
| 3D models | 7 | macOS |
| Layered-image packages | 4 | jFile |
| Illustrator / EPS / QOI | 3 | jFile |
| SVG & PDF | 2 | macOS |
| Markdown | 2 | macOS |
| Total explicitly listed | 183 | 21 by jFile |
21 formats macOS can’t preview - jFile can
One honest note on the count: text and code, images, audio, and video are matched by UTType conformance, not a fixed list - jFile previews any file conforming to public.text, public.image, public.audio, or public.movie. So 183 is the concrete enumerated number; the effective total, counting every conforming source and markup type, is higher.
🧰 More Capabilities
Smart Search Engine
- Spotlight translation layer for fast results on indexed volumes
- Falls back to deep traversal on network shares; asks before scanning a non-indexed local folder
- SQLite-backed streaming for very large result sets (Spotlight returns up to 20,000 matches by default, adjustable)
- Degrades gracefully - waits briefly for the first Spotlight result, then falls back if the index is unavailable
Remote Connections
- FTP and FTPS (TLS) with passive mode (PASV)
- SFTP, NFS, WebDAV/WebDAVS, SMB
- Amazon S3, Backblaze B2, Cloudflare R2, and any S3-compatible service
- Dropbox (OAuth PKCE authentication)
- Saved server profiles with Keychain credential storage
Dual-Pane Browser
- Details, List, and Icons view modes with zoom control
- Live preview panel with metadata - tap the pencil icon to edit file name, dates, and author inline
- Previews 183 file types in-panel - including CAD, layered-image, and Illustrator/EPS formats macOS can’t show natively
- Edit text, Word, OpenDocument, and RTF documents in place - with optional Apple Writing Tools (off by default; enable in Settings → General) - then Save or Save a Copy (your original stays untouched); works on remote files too
- AI Insights tab in the preview - on-device summary, tags, and related files for the selected document
- Favorites, Volumes, Places, and Network Devices sidebar
- Drag & drop between panes and to external apps (Finder, Desktop)
- Browse inside ZIP and TAR archives as folders & copy to and from them
- Open any number of detached panels for side-by-side browsing across locations
- Saved Views - save and recall panel configurations instantly
- iCloud Drive integration
File Operations
- Async copy, move, delete, rename
- Context menus matching Finder
- Progress HUDs with cancel support
- Finder Trash integration (Dock + Finder)
- Finder-compatible color tags and tag filtering
- Batch Rename with live preview and conflict detection
- Create new files from built-in templates
- Fast Delete for large folders using raw POSIX syscalls
- Folder comparison with side-by-side diff view
- Folder synchronization between local folders
macOS Integration
- Custom
jfile://URL scheme for scripting - Services menu: open folders or search text from any app
- Drag folders from Finder onto the address bar
- Drag remote files (S3, FTP, SFTP) to Finder - downloaded on demand
- Dock badge with live copy/move progress
- Bonjour/mDNS network device discovery with subnet sweep
- Native notifications for long operations
- Open Terminal at the current directory from the toolbar
- Brightness/dimming slider to reduce eye strain during long sessions
Volume Health
- Read-only, per-drive diagnostic - explains why search, content previews, or indexing are degraded on a volume
- Reports Spotlight indexing coverage, file identity, readability, and volume facts - each with a confidence level
- Guided and never destructive - copies the exact
fsck_apfs/mdutilcommand for Terminal, reimports the index, or grants access; it never runs a privileged operation itself
⚡ Copy Performance: jFile vs Finder
jFile uses the macOS copyfile(3) kernel API directly with COPYFILE_RECURSIVE - no pre-scan, no per-file overhead.
| Factor | Finder | jFile NLP |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-scan | Scans entire tree first | None - starts immediately |
| Per-file overhead | ObjC dispatch, undo, Spotlight | Single C callback |
| Small files (1000s) | Baseline | ~20–40% faster |
| Large files (GB+) | Baseline | Similar (disk-bound) |
| Network volumes | Pre-scan can take 30+ s | Significantly faster |
| Conflict resolution | Per-file modal prompts | Pre-resolved once |
Get jFile NLP
Available today on the Mac App Store.
macOS 26 or later · Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3/M4) · No subscription · 100% on-device *
A Finder alternative with no subscription
jFile NLP is a one-time $4.99 purchase on the Mac App Store - no subscription, no in-app purchase, no account. It stands alongside ForkLift, Path Finder, and Commander One as a dual-pane Finder alternative, but adds an on-device, Apple-Intelligence natural-language search bar no other Mac file manager offers.
Frequently asked questions
Does jFile require a subscription?
No. jFile NLP is a one-time $4.99 purchase on the Mac App Store - no subscription, no in-app purchase, no account.
Does jFile send my files or searches to the cloud?
Your files, searches, voice, OCR, image recognition, and document Insights are processed entirely on your Mac using Apple Intelligence and the Apple Neural Engine - nothing is uploaded, cached, or sold. The one exception is the optional Apple Writing Tools feature, which is off by default - you enable it yourself in Settings → General. If you turn it on and use it, Apple may process the text you select (never whole files) using Apple’s Private Cloud Compute for longer or more complex requests. Apple states that data isn’t stored or made accessible to Apple.
What do I need to run jFile?
A Mac with Apple Silicon (M1 or later) running macOS 26 or later. Apple Intelligence enhances natural-language search, but a built-in deterministic parser handles your queries when Apple Intelligence isn’t available - so natural-language search works either way.
How is jFile different from Finder?
jFile is a dual-pane file manager you can search in plain English or by voice. It searches by name, type, size, date, content, tags, and even the text and contents of images (OCR) - and copies small files up to 20–40% faster than Finder in internal testing.
What file types can jFile preview?
jFile previews 183 explicitly-listed file types in its built-in panel - raster images, Office, iWork and OpenDocument documents, text and code, audio, video, 3D models, SVG, PDF, and Markdown. 21 of those are professional formats macOS can’t preview on its own: CAD and drafting files (DWG, DXF, Revit, SolidWorks, Inventor, Rhino, SketchUp), layered-image packages (OpenRaster, Krita, Procreate, Sketch), and Adobe Illustrator, EPS, and QOI artwork. Text, images, audio, and video are matched by type conformance rather than a fixed list, so the effective total is higher.
Is jFile a Finder alternative like ForkLift or Path Finder?
Yes - with remote connections (SMB, FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, S3, Dropbox), batch rename, and folder sync - but at a one-time $4.99 price with an on-device AI search bar no other file manager offers.
Support
Need help with jFile NLP? The jFile support guide covers search syntax, network access, preview, and troubleshooting.
Contact Us
For bug reports, use Help ▸ Report a Bug… in the app: it sends diagnostic details directly to IBC Partners, never to a third party. For feature requests or general questions, please email us at:
jFile NLP pairs natural-language search with a professional dual-pane file manager. Stop remembering complex search syntax - just describe what you need.
Guides: jFile vs ForkLift vs Path Finder · search Mac files in plain English · search inside images (OCR).
While you're here, check out jBrowse - the fast, privacy-focused iOS browser.