The Burrow guide

Press ⌘K anywhere. Type a few letters of what you want (new folder, split, dark, duplicates) and press ↩. Every command shows its shortcut, so the palette is also the shortcut reference.

• Folders you visit often come first: type part of a name to jump there (see Jump to any folder).
• ⌘↩ on a folder or file opens it in your code editor.
• Typing a feature’s name also offers Learn: …, which opens its page here.

Key	Does
↑ ↓ (← → in the grid)	Move; ⇧ extends the selection
Type a name	Jump to it
↩	Open
Space	Show or hide the preview
⌫	Back
⌘⌫	Move to Trash
F2	Rename
Tab	Next pane
Esc	Clear the filter, then the selection

Everything else is in ⌘K. Prefer j k h l? Turn on Vim keys.

Turn them on in Customize ▸ General ▸ Keyboard. Then, in the file list:

• j / k down and up (J / K extend the selection)
• h / l out of and into a folder (left and right in the grid and gallery)
• gg / G first and last
• / filter

Letters then move instead of jumping to a name. Arrows work as always.

Burrow is free to try for 14 days, with everything included. The sidebar shows how many days are left.

A license is $19, once. It covers 2 Macs, includes a year of updates, and keeps working after that with the versions released in that year. Buy it from Customize ▸ License (or ⌘K ▸ Buy Burrow), then paste the key from your receipt email and click Activate. Activating needs the internet once; after that Burrow works offline.

Moving to a new Mac? In Customize ▸ License, click Release This Mac, then activate on the new one. You can also release a Mac from your purchases page (Manage Licenses).

When the trial ends without a license, Burrow asks for one. Your folders, sidebar and settings are kept, and “Show in Finder” in other apps goes back to Finder until Burrow is licensed.

Burrow looks for a new version once a day. When there is one, it shows what’s new and asks before installing; Burrow restarts on the new version and your windows and tabs come back.

To look now, choose Burrow ▸ Check for Updates… (or ⌘K ▸ Check for Updates). To stop the daily check, turn off Check for updates automatically in Customize ▸ General.

Updates are signed: Burrow only installs a version that carries its own signature and Apple’s notarization.

A license includes a year of updates (see Trial and license). After that year, Burrow keeps working and only offers the versions your license covers, so an update never asks you for a new license.

Choose Help ▸ Contact Support… to write to [email protected]. The email starts with Burrow’s version, your macOS version and Mac model at the bottom, so we can answer sooner.

Something broken? Help ▸ Report a Problem… opens an email with a few questions to fill in: what happened, and how to make it happen again. If Burrow crashed in the last month, it asks whether to attach the crash report. You can read it first with Show Report.

Burrow never sends anything by itself: the email opens in your mail app, and you send it. Many answers are already here in the guide; ⌘K finds them too (type a feature’s name).

Before you move Burrow to the Trash:

1. Hand “Show in Finder” back. If you turned on Use Burrow for “Show in Finder” in Customize ▸ General, turn it off, so other apps reveal files in Finder again. Turn off Open Desktop folders in Burrow there too.
2. Free your license if you’ll use it on another Mac: Customize ▸ License ▸ Release This Mac. (You can also do it later from your purchases page.)
3. Quit Burrow and drag it from Applications to the Trash.

To remove everything Burrow kept, also delete these, if they’re there:

• ~/Library/Application Support/Burrow (sidebar, workspaces, custom themes)
• ~/Library/Preferences/app.tryburrow.burrow.plist (settings)
• ~/Library/Caches/app.tryburrow.burrow
• Burrow in System Settings ▸ Privacy & Security ▸ Accessibility, if you allowed it there

Your files are never touched: Burrow only shows them.

Burrow remembers where you go and how often (like zoxide). In ⌘K, type part of a folder’s name (rep for ~/Repos) and press ↩. Go to Path takes a full path, with completion.

⇧⌘P lists the repositories in ~/Repos, ~/Developer, ~/Projects and anywhere you’ve visited, with their branch and how many files have changed. ↩ opens one; ⌘↩ opens it in your editor.

Recents (in the sidebar, or ⌘K) lists files you opened lately, from any app. Screenshots (⌘K) lists every screenshot and screen recording, newest first, including ones you never opened.

Favorites are yours to arrange. Drop a folder on the Favorites title to add it, or right-click a folder ▸ Add to Sidebar ▸ Favorites. You can also use Add Folder… in Customize ▸ Sidebar. Drag favorites to reorder them. Right-click one to rename it, or to remove it (built-in ones like Desktop are hidden instead, and come back from Customize). Built-in favorites keep their shortcuts, such as ⇧⌘H for Home.

Drag a folder onto the sidebar to pin it, or ⌘K ▸ Add to or Remove from Sidebar. Make groups for clients or projects (New Sidebar Group). Click a section’s title to fold it away. Drag the title to move the whole section, including Favorites, Cloud, Locations, Tags and Searches. Drag folders within a group, or saved searches, to reorder them. Choose what shows in Customize ▸ Sidebar.

• Toggle Split (⌘K) splits the window or goes back to one.
• Split Right / Split Down add panes, up to four (a 2×2 grid).
• Drag a folder to the edge of a pane and drop it in the highlighted zone: it opens there.
• Tab moves between panes; the divider drags to resize.

Copy or move between them with ⌘K ▸ Copy to Other Pane / Move to Other Pane.

⌘T opens a tab, ⌘W closes it, and Reopen Closed Tab brings the last one back. Drag a tab left or right to reorder. Burrow restores your tabs when it opens.

Save Workspace… (⌘K) names the window’s tabs and panes; Workspace: name reopens them.

⌘J shows or hides the terminal; ⇧⌘J opens another. With follow on (the link button in its header), the shell cds along as you move between folders, but waits while a command runs or you’re typing.

• ⌘C / ⌘V copy and paste; ⌥⌘V moves instead.
• Move to… / Copy to… (⌘K) pick a destination by typing.
• The shelf holds files while you go somewhere else: Add to Shelf, then Copy Shelf Here.
• Name clashes ask once: replace, keep both or skip. Everything undoes with ⌘Z.

Select several files and press F2 (or ⌘K ▸ Rename). Type what to find and what to put instead; the new names show as you type. Regular expressions work, with $1 for captures. One ⌘Z undoes the lot.

⌘K ▸ Tag: Red (or any colour) tags the selection; again removes it. Tags show on rows, and the Tags section of the sidebar lists everything with each one.

Compress to Zip (⌘K) zips the selection; Extract Here unpacks zip, tar, gz, 7z, rar and more. Select an archive to see what’s inside in the preview, and pull out a single file without extracting the rest.

⌘K ▸ Tidy Up Folder… sorts a messy folder (Downloads, the Desktop) into folders by kind. It shows what will move first; folders and files still downloading stay. One ⌘Z puts it all back.

• ⌥⌘C copies the path; ⌥⇧⌘C the path from the repository root.
• Copy Contents puts a text file’s text on the clipboard without opening it.
• Copy as Data URI gives data:image/png;base64,… for CSS, HTML or a test fixture.

They’re in the selection bar’s More ▸ Copy As and in ⌘K.

⌘F and type: the folder shows only what matches. Esc clears it. Switch the scope to search your whole Mac with Spotlight, by name or contents.

⌥⌘F searches the contents of every file below the folder as you type, plain or regular expression. In a git repository it skips ignored files. ↩ opens the line in your editor; ⌥↩ in Burrow’s.

Press ⌘F and choose where to look: In the current folder or This Mac. Type some words, pick a kind and a date, or both. Then click the bookmark at the end of the search bar, or choose Save Search to Sidebar in ⌘K. The search appears in the sidebar under Searches, and you can name it there.

Clicking it runs the search again, so it shows what matches now, like Finder’s smart folders. A search can be filters alone, with no words, for example:

• Images changed this week in Downloads
• PDFs changed this month in Documents
• Code anywhere on This Mac, changed today

The search bar opens with the saved words and filters, so you can tweak them. A changed search can be saved as a new one. Right-click a saved search to rename it, move it or remove it. Each one is also in ⌘K as “Search: name”.

Searches use Spotlight, so nothing is crawled or uploaded. Files Spotlight doesn’t index (app internals, hidden folders) don’t show up.

Space (or ⌥⌘P) shows the file under the cursor beside the list: Markdown rendered, code highlighted, CSV as a grid, JSON laid out, folders with their sizes, archives with their contents. ⌥⌘↩ expands it to the whole window.

• Pinch or the − / + in the corner to zoom; double-click for actual pixels where you clicked.
• Past 200% pixels stay sharp, for checking artwork. Transparency shows on a checkerboard.
• Under the picture: its colours (click one to copy the hex) and, for photos, the camera, lens, exposure and date, with Map for where it was taken.

Select a .ttf, .otf, .ttc or .woff2. Type over the sample to see it at several sizes; the alphabet, figures and punctuation follow. A collection shows each style. Install Font copies it into your fonts (⌘Z takes it out).

A file Burrow doesn’t recognise opens as a hex dump (offset, bytes and text) with what its first bytes say it is: a SQLite database, a Mac program, a zip, a WebAssembly module…

⌘K ▸ New Note makes one. ⌘E switches between Preview, Edit and Split. Tables, task lists, footnotes, maths (KaTeX), diagrams (Mermaid), callouts and front matter all render. Paste a picture and it’s saved beside the note and linked.

• Type [[ to link another note in the vault; type @ to link any file on your Mac.
• Under a note, Mentioned in lists the notes linking to it, and Not linked the ones that say its name without linking (Link fixes the first mention).
• Rename or move a file in Burrow and the links to it are updated.

Click a box in a rendered note to tick it. Write dates the Obsidian Tasks way: 📅 2026-11-04 due, ⏳ scheduled, 🔁 every week to repeat, ⏫ for priority. They show as chips, red once overdue; ticking adds ✅ with today’s date, and a repeating task comes back with its next date.

⌥⇧⌘D opens today’s note, making it if needed. In an Obsidian vault it follows your daily notes settings (folder, date format, template).

Use the share button above a rendered note, or ⌘K ▸ Export Note as PDF / HTML. Diagrams and maths come out as drawn. The PDF is paged for your paper size and always light; the HTML keeps its styles inside and is saved beside the note.

Burrow makes no network requests of its own. Images from the web in a note (badges, hot-linked pictures) aren’t loaded; a bar offers Load for that note. To always load them: Customize ▸ General ▸ Notes.

⌘4 shows the folder as a table. + adds a property (text, number, select, tags, date, checkbox, URL). Notes keep their values in front matter, other files in an attribute. Click a cell to edit; Filter narrows the rows; click a column title to sort.

Above a table: Board groups cards by a select (drag one to another column to change it); Gallery shows a picture of each file (a note’s cover or first image); Calendar places files on a month by a date (drag to re-date, + for a note on that day).

Select pictures, then the selection bar’s Image menu (or ⌘K): Convert to… and Resize…. New files go beside the originals; halving [email protected] makes name.png. ⌃⌘C copies the picture itself, for Figma or Slack.

Export a picture once at its largest, select it and choose Make Image Sets. Burrow makes the smaller copies an app or web page needs and puts them beside it:

• [email protected] gives [email protected] and icon.png.
• [email protected] gives icon.png.
• A picture with no scale in its name counts as @3x. You get [email protected] and [email protected], and hero.png stays as it is.
• A PDF or SVG is drawn sharp at each size, as logo.png, [email protected] and [email protected].

Pictures are only ever made smaller, in their own format (WebP becomes PNG). Their colour profile is kept. Run it again after you change the original: the copies from last time go to the Trash and the new ones take their place. ⌘Z puts the old ones back.

It’s in the image menu of the selection bar, and in ⌘K.

Select a photo and choose Remove Background. A transparent PNG of the subject appears beside it. It runs on your Mac (Apple’s Vision); nothing is uploaded. The first time takes a few seconds.

Select a screenshot, photo of a page, or scanned PDF and choose Copy Text. The text lands on the clipboard, line by line. On your Mac, nothing uploaded.

Select PDFs and pictures in the order you want and choose Combine into PDF. Pictures become pages of their own size.

Remove Location from Photos takes out where a photo was taken and keeps the camera details; Remove All Metadata removes camera, dates, location and captions too. The picture isn’t re-compressed, and its orientation stays. The originals go to the Trash: ⌘Z brings them back.

Select two files (or one in each pane) and ⌘K ▸ Compare. Text shows as a diff. Pictures show side by side, under a slider, or as a Difference with changed pixels in red. S switches.

Compare two folders to see what’s only on each side, what changed and what’s the same; click a changed file to compare it. Sync copies what’s missing either way, syncs both ways (newer wins), or makes one side match the other. It says what it will do first, and one ⌘Z undoes it.

⌘K ▸ Show Space Used… (or This Mac ▸ Explore Home). Each block is as big as it is on disk; big folders show what’s inside them. Click a block to go in, the path above (or ⌫) to come back. The list beside it has Show and Move to Trash.

⌘K ▸ Find Duplicates… groups identical files below the folder, biggest waste first. Pick a size to ignore small ones, tick what to remove (or Tick Extra Copies), then Move to Trash. One copy of each always stays.

⌘K ▸ Clean Up Build Folders… finds dependency, build and cache folders below a folder, biggest first, and moves the ones you tick to the Trash. Projects rebuild them when needed.

⇧⌘C shows every drive with how full it is, and (on request) what’s using the space in Home. From there: Explore Home, Find Duplicates, Clean Up Build Folders.

Changed files carry a badge: M modified, U new, A staged new, D deleted, R renamed, ! in conflict. A folder with changes inside gets a dot. The branch chip in the path bar shows the branch, ↑ commits to push and ↓ to pull, and how many files changed.

⇧⌘U (or a click on the chip) opens Review Changes: files beside their diffs, refreshing every two seconds while you or a coding agent works. Burrow never takes git’s lock, so it can’t block an agent’s or editor’s git.

• ↑↓ moves between files, Space stages one, A stages them all.
• ⌫ (or right-click ▸ Discard Changes…) throws a file’s changes away. Your version goes to the Trash first, so ⌘Z brings it back.
• ↩ writes the message, ⌘↩ commits. Tick Amend last commit to fold the change into the previous commit instead. Don’t amend one you’ve already pushed.

Hide Git-Ignored Files (⌘K) hides ignored files; otherwise they’re shown dimmed.

See also Branches, pull and push and Git history.

Right-click the branch chip, or use the buttons at the top of Review Changes:

• Pull brings in new commits. When both your branch and the remote have moved on, Burrow asks whether to Rebase (yours on top of theirs) or Merge.
• Push sends your commits. A branch that’s never been pushed is published to origin and set to track it.
• Fetch checks the remote without changing anything, and updates the ↓ count.
• Switch Branch… lists branches, most recently used first. Type to filter, then ↩ to switch. New Branch… makes one from where you are, and your changes come along.
• Stash Changes puts your changes (new files too) aside and leaves a clean copy. Apply Latest Stash, or the ⋯ menu in Review Changes, brings them back.

Each one is also in ⌘K as Git: …. They use your own git setup, so SSH keys and saved passwords work as they do in Terminal. These are the only times Burrow goes online, and only when you ask.

Merge conflicts: when a merge, rebase or cherry-pick stops on a conflict, Review Changes shows a banner. Right-click a conflicted file to choose Use My Version or Use Their Version. Or edit the file, then choose Mark as Resolved. Then click Continue, or Abort to go back to how things were.

In Review Changes, switch to History to see the commits on your branch, newest first. Click one (or use ↑↓) to see what it changed, file by file.

To see the history of one file, select it and choose Git: History in ⌘K. Or right-click it in Review Changes and choose History of This File. Renames are followed. Click the × on the file’s name to go back to the whole repository.

⇧⌘E opens the selection (or the folder) in your code editor; ⌘K ▸ Open in Terminal opens your terminal app there. Pick them in Customize ▸ General ▸ Apps.

⌘K ▸ Choose Theme… previews each as you move through them. Every theme has a light and a dark version. Choose which in Customize ▸ Appearance: Light, Dark, or System to follow your Mac. You can also use ⌘K ▸ Appearance: Light. A light theme works even when your Mac is dark.

Accent: pick a color in Customize ▸ Appearance ▸ Accent (or ⌘K ▸ Accent: Purple), or any color from the picker. It goes on top of whichever theme you choose, in light and dark. Choose the first swatch to go back to each theme’s own accent.

Burrow keeps every theme readable. Quieter text never gets too faint, and buttons darken the accent just enough for their white text to stand out. This applies to your own themes too. Themes are small JSON files: Open Themes Folder to add your own.

⌘, opens Customize: what the sidebar shows, the theme and views, the global hotkey that brings Burrow forward from anywhere, your editor and terminal, and whether Desktop folders open here instead of Finder.