FAQ

A few common patterns: drag a fresh download straight into a Slack or Mail compose window without opening Finder; stage a batch of files from different folders and send them as a zip; pop the panel over a fullscreen Figma, VS Code, or browser session to grab the screenshot you just took; press Enter on a PDF or image to read it inline; extract the text from an image without opening an OCR app. Float pays for itself the first time you don’t have to leave fullscreen to attach a file.

Yes — that’s where it earns the most love. The panel summons via a global hotkey on top of any app, including apps running in a fullscreen Space. You can drag files from Float straight into the fullscreen app (Mail, Slack, Figma, the browser) without leaving fullscreen mode. See the loop on the preview page.

No — they do different jobs. Finder is the right tool for organizing a 10,000-file project, searching a whole drive, or managing tags. Float is the right tool for the 5–30 files you’ve touched recently and want one-click access to: today’s downloads, last week’s screenshots, the assets you’re actively working with. We use both, every day.

Different tools for different jobs. Yoink and Dropzone are drag shelves — you drop files into them, then drag them out. Float starts with a visual grid of files you’ve recently touched and pinned, so you don’t have to put them anywhere first. Raycast and Alfred are keyboard launchers; Float is for moments where you want to see the file before you grab it, and drag it out instead of typing its name. If a keyboard launcher already works for you, Float probably isn’t going to change that. If you spend your day dragging files into apps, give it 14 days.

For when you need to send or process a group of files. Click files to add them to the staging bar at the bottom — they can come from different watched folders. Then drag the whole stack into another app, click Zip to bundle them, or Copy to put them all on the clipboard at once. It’s the difference between dragging six files one at a time and dragging six files once.

Yes — select the file, press Enter to open the preview, click Extract Text. The text is on your clipboard in a couple of seconds. Works on images, PDFs, and screenshots. No external OCR app needed.

Float watches specific folders you choose and displays your recent files in the menu bar panel. By default, only files directly inside those folders are shown. If you want to see files in nested subfolders too, enable Include Subfolders in Settings under Watched Folders.

Float is lightweight. Thumbnail generation runs in the background using Apple’s native ImageIO framework. The “Max files shown” setting (default: 100) keeps memory usage low. Even with subfolder scanning enabled, Float caps the number of files it renders.

Technically yes, but we recommend watching specific folders (Desktop, Downloads, Projects) for the best experience. Large folder trees with subfolder scanning enabled may increase initial load time.

Thumbnails are cached in your system cache folder (~/Library/Caches/app.filefloat/). You can clear them anytime in Settings under Thumbnail Cache.

Float reads file metadata (name, size, date) and generates thumbnails locally using Apple’s native frameworks. No data ever leaves your Mac. See our Privacy Policy for full details.

Drag Float.app to the Trash. To also remove cached thumbnails, delete ~/Library/Caches/app.filefloat/. Settings are stored in localStorage within the app’s WebView data, which is removed automatically when you trash the app.