File Operations

The mechanics of copying, moving, trashing, and renaming files in Seiz — built around safety, undo, and never silently failing.

Overview#

File managers are doing the most consequential thing on your computer — moving and deleting your stuff. Seiz takes that seriously, with a few principles that show up everywhere:

Operations always go through the macOS Trash, never directly to permanent delete.
Most destructive things can be undone with ⌘Z.
Anything that takes longer than a moment shows up in the Operations queue with cancel and retry buttons.
Dangerous paths (system folders, your Library) trigger an extra warning before you can delete them.

Standard Mac shortcuts work the way you'd expect: ⌘C to copy, ⌘X to cut, ⌘V to paste. (Cut + Paste means move — Seiz is one of the few file managers on macOS that actually supports cut-and-paste of files, which Finder still doesn't.)

Same actions are available from the right-click menu or by drag-and-drop. See Drag & Drop for the gesture-based equivalents.

Duplicate#

Press ⌘D on a selected file (or right-click ▸ Duplicate) to make a copy in the same folder. The copy is named file copy.ext, then file copy 2.ext, file copy 3.ext, and so on if you keep duplicating.

Rename#

Click a selected file's name (or use the Rename context menu item) to edit it in-place. Just the name part is selected — the extension stays untouched. Press Enter to commit, Escape to cancel, leave it empty to revert.

Names can't contain a slash, can't be exactly “.” or “..”, and can't exceed 255 characters — Seiz blocks any of these with a clear error message instead of silently corrupting the file.

For renaming many files at once, see BatchRename.

Move to Trash#

Press ⌘⌫ (Command + Delete) or right-click ▸ Move to Trash. Files go to the macOS Trash — recoverable until you empty it.

If your selection includes a mix of writable and read-only files, Seiz trashes the writable ones and tells you which were skipped — for example, “3 files deleted, 1 file skipped (read-only)”. No silent failures, no partial confusion.

Dangerous paths get an extra warning

Trying to trash anything in a system-critical location — /System, /Library, /usr, your ~/Library, your .ssh folder — triggers a confirmation dialog naming exactly what you're about to delete and warning that it could damage macOS. You can still proceed if you meant it, but it's never an accident.

Undo#

Press ⌘Z to undo the last move. Seiz keeps the last 20 move operations in the undo stack — well past what you'd remember by hand.

When a File Already Exists#

If you copy or move a file to a destination that already has a file with the same name, Seiz shows a merge conflict dialog. Pick per-file: Replace, Skip, or Keep Both (which renames the new one to file 2.ext). Use Apply to all when you have many conflicts and the same answer applies to all of them.

Settings has a default conflict policy — set it to “Always ask,” “Keep newest,” “Keep largest,” or “Keep both” so common cases skip the dialog entirely.

Creating New Files and Folders#

Press ⌘⇧N to create a new folder in the current directory. Seiz automatically picks a non-conflicting name (New Folder, then New Folder 2, etc.) and pre-selects the name field so you can rename immediately.

Right-click ▸ New File opens a small submenu of templates: text, markdown, Swift, HTML, JSON, Python. Each starts with a sensible empty template.

The Operations Queue#

Anything that takes longer than a moment — big copies, archive operations, uploads to a remote server — appears in the operations queue. It's accessed from the small spinner at the bottom of the window when something is in progress, or the checkmark icon once everything is done.

For each operation you can see:

What it's doing (e.g. “Copy ‘backup.zip’”) and progress in items and bytes.
An estimated time remaining.
A cancel button while it's running.
A retry button if it failed (network blip on a remote upload, for example).

Completed entries auto-dismiss after 30 seconds. Click Clear to remove them all immediately.

iCloud-Safe by Default#

For files that live in iCloud Drive (or any folder where macOS keeps things online-only until you need them), Seiz uses the system's file coordinator behind the scenes. That means iCloud knows when a file is being copied or moved and downloads it on demand instead of operating on a phantom placeholder. You don't have to think about it — it just works.

Next Steps#

Drag & Drop — the gesture-based version of move and copy.
Context Menu — every right-click action available on files and folders.
BatchRename — rename many files at once with stackable rules.

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