A modern file manager for Windows and Linux — with the two things you miss most in Explorer: a real folder tree, and file dialogs that follow you between apps.
Alpha File Manager is an independent build of Sigma File Manager, maintained by kizemo. It tracks upstream and layers on a folder tree, cross-app dialog path sync, and a long list of day-to-day fixes.
Important
Alpha File Manager is an independent community project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or supported by the Sigma File Manager project. The base application's features and branding belong to Aleksey Hoffman.
Everything below is ours. Nothing in this section exists upstream.
| Feature | Since | |
|---|---|---|
| 🗂️ | Folder tree sidebar — persistent, tracks the active pane | 2.2.x |
| ⚡ | Focus Sync — every file dialog follows the folder you're browsing | 2.2.x |
| 🧱 | Directory & non-media rows keep a fixed height as thumbnail size changes | 3.1.2 |
| List columns vertically centred — item / modified / created / type / link status | 3.1.2 | |
| 🗃️ | Dashboard favourites grouped by category, and editable | 3.1.2 |
| 🧭 | Right-click menu on the folder tree — 6 actions | 3.1.0 |
| 🎚️ | Per-folder layout toggle, moved into the tab toolbar | 3.1.0 |
| 🖼️ | Four thumbnail sizes — 32 / 48 / 64 / 80 px | 3.1.0 |
| 🧹 | Thumbnail cache usage + one-click clear | 3.0.2 |
| 🔀 | Mixed-folder sorting toggle | 3.0.2 |
| ✅ | Box selection on by default | 3.0.2 |
| 🧠 | Batch-rename data-loss fix — no more silent overwrites | 3.0.1 |
| 📦 | One-step installer, in-place upgrade, complete uninstall | 3.0.0 |
3.1.2 is a polish pass over how rows and cards behave when you change the thumbnail size, plus the folder tree, sidebar and favourites work.
Changing the thumbnail size used to make every row taller — including the ones that hold no thumbnail at all, so the extra height was pure whitespace.
- Grid: directory cards and non-media file cards now keep a fixed height at all four sizes. Non-media cards still change width (which decides how many fit per row), just not height.
- List: directory rows and non-media file rows likewise keep a fixed height — the default one. Image and video rows still scale with the setting, so thumbnails are never cropped.
- The small step moved up a notch so card content is no longer clipped — the description line used to survive as only its top edge.
All four steps now read their pixel and height values from one table, so the virtual scroller, the CSS variables and the rendered cards can no longer disagree.
Item, Modified, Created, Type and Link status were pinned to the top of the row while Name, Size, Tags and Link count sat centred. All of them are centred now.
This also fixed a stylesheet rule that had never matched: the link-status column's class name was spelled differently in the component and in the CSS, so that column was getting no styling at all.
- The folder tree scrolls properly. It used to overflow the panel with no way to scroll, hiding the last folders. It is a real scroll container now.
- The sidebar panel groups things: Frequent and History get their own sections, the redundant headings are gone, and clicking a section title jumps to the dashboard. Favourites and Tagged default to expanded; Frequent and History default to collapsed.
- Dashboard favourites are grouped by category and can be edited, and the favourites area distinguishes categories, directories and files by icon. The sidebar mirrors the grouping.
Right-clicking a search result and choosing Open containing directory in Alpha used to open a new tab. It now splits the window: the containing folder on the left, the search results on the right, and the results list is preserved.
- A newly created favourite category no longer disappears after a restart. The new field was silently dropped by a top-level field allow-list — the UI looked correct and the data was simply gone.
- The home button opens This PC instead of your user folder.
- Search inside a folder now recurses into subfolders.
- Box selection follows the grid column width at every thumbnail size.
- The settings external-links menu is branded, and the dead Discussions entry is gone.
3.1.0 is everything we added after renaming the app to Alpha File Manager. 3.0.0 was the rebranding release; 3.0.1 fixed a batch-rename data-loss bug; 3.0.2 added list thumbnails. This release is the polish pass on top of those.
- The folder tree gets a right-click menu. Right-click any node — a drive, a folder, a file — and you get Copy, Cut, Paste, Rename, Open containing directory, Properties. Paste only appears when your clipboard actually holds something. Rename reuses the same dialog as the file list, so it behaves identically wherever you invoke it from.
- The layout toggle moved to the tab toolbar, next to refresh, and now writes to the current folder only instead of globally. Two tabs showing the same folder can sit in different layouts, and switching tabs no longer clobbers the other one's view. If you prefer the old global behaviour, the toggle is still in the collapsed ⋮ menu under "this folder only".
- Drives show free space and total. Locations entries display
147.1 GB / 931.3 GBinstead of an item count.
- Four thumbnail sizes. Small (32 px), Medium (48 px), Large (64 px) and Extra large (80 px) — pick one from the tab toolbar or Settings → General → File view. Row height follows the choice (48 / 64 / 80 / 96 logical px for image and video rows), so the list never misaligns when you switch. Directory and non-media rows keep a fixed height — see 3.1.2.
- Thumbnails are generated lazily: only for rows scrolled into view.
- The home title sits outside the theme image, at a readable size. Clicking the image itself now opens background management directly.
- Settings links to the official site and this repository. The about text describes what this build adds over Sigma File Manager, rather than the upstream blurb.
- Focus Sync stopped going silent after the app had been running for a few minutes. The sidecar recorded a dialog as "already written" even when the write had been refused, which permanently disabled its own retry path — so after an early failure, every later path change was ignored until you closed the dialog and reopened it. Failed writes are no longer recorded as successes.
- The extension loader rejected our own extension. A code scanner flagged the
word
selfinside an English comment in the bundled extension, so Focus Sync was refused before its worker ever started — which is what made path sync look broken everywhere at once. The scanner now ignores comments and string literals, while still rejecting real violations in executable code. - Right-click Copy / Cut on the tree threw a signature error instead of populating the clipboard.
- Upgrades and uninstalls now terminate the app's whole process tree, so a leftover helper process can no longer hold a file open and abort the install.
Version lineage: 2.2.x → 3.0.0 rebrand → 3.0.1 rename data-loss fix → 3.0.2 list thumbnails → 3.1.0 navigation & thumbnail sizes → 3.1.2 this release.
A folder tree down the left edge that mirrors the file system and tracks whichever pane is active — so you can see the shape of where you are and reach any ancestor in one click.
- Always one click away — a dedicated
FolderTreebutton in the navigator toolbar, deliberately not buried in the layout dropdown. - Follows everything — tracks the address bar, the favourites panel, and the active pane in split view; each side keeps its own expansion state.
- Stays compact — on navigation only the current path's ancestor chain stays open; everything else collapses.
- Predictable clicks — click a row to enter it, click the chevron to expand without changing directory.
- Unambiguous drives — root nodes show volume label and drive letter
(
Win (C:)), so multi-drive and WSL setups read at a glance. - Right-clickable — the six-action menu described above.
- Remembers — show/hide state persists across restarts.
Tracks upstream issue #499.
Browse to a folder, then open a Save As / Open dialog in any Windows app — Chrome downloads, Word, VS Code, DingTalk, Feishu — and it's already sitting in that same folder.
Zero configuration. The installer bundles the extension and a small local companion process; a Windows scheduled task starts it at logon. There is nothing to launch by hand.
The rules it holds itself to
| Never steals focus | If the dialog isn't in the foreground, the write waits — it is never forced. |
| Never leaves a dirty filename | The address bar is the target. When a fallback must touch the filename field, it restores the original and reads the value back before committing. |
| Never writes a stale path | If Alpha FM isn't running, writes are refused rather than filling your dialog with where you used to be. |
The extension requests only commands, toolbar, notifications, and HTTP to
127.0.0.1 — no shell access, no filesystem access.
Status — still being hardened. Validated against native Win32 dialogs; behaviour varies across Chromium and UWP hosts.
Primary download: www.aiec.fun/alpha-file-manager — this is the update channel the app itself checks.
GitHub releases carry the same installer and act as a fallback mirror.
Windows builds are unsigned, so SmartScreen reports "Unknown publisher" — click More info → Run anyway. Upgrading in place keeps your settings, extensions and window layout.
- Upstream: aleksey-hoffman/sigma-file-manager by Aleksey Hoffman. The base application, its features and its branding belong to upstream.
- Focus Sync extension: lives in THIS repository under
extensions/kizemo.focus-sync/— extension payload, sidecar source and the standalone installer. Released standalone installers are archived at kizemo/focus-sync. - Maintainer of this fork: kizemo
Additional code reused under its original terms: inaku-Gyan/PathWrap (MIT) · QwenLM/qwen-code (Apache-2.0).
GPL-3.0-or-later — see LICENSE.md. Fork additions are
contributed under the same license.
As required by GPL-3, the corresponding source for every shipped binary is available at:
| Component | Source |
|---|---|
| Alpha File Manager (this fork) | https://github.com/kizemo/alpha-file-manager |
| Sigma File Manager (base) | https://github.com/aleksey-hoffman/sigma-file-manager |
| Focus Sync extension + sidecar | bundled in this repository, extensions/kizemo.focus-sync/ |