v · released
Know what's on every drive.
StorCat catalogues what is on a drive so you can search it when the drive is not plugged in. Point it at a volume, and it records every file's name, size and dates into a catalog you keep — one searchable JSON file and one standalone HTML file that opens in any browser.
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macOS · Windows · Linux — a desktop app and a command line in one binary
The workspace
Everything in one view.
This release replaced a mode-switching interface with a single workspace, so the four things below are not four places you go. They are four things that happen in the same window.
One view
Catalogs, tree and details, side by side
A rail of your catalogs on one side, the directory tree of the selected one in the middle, and a details panel for whatever you are looking at. Nothing is hidden behind a mode you have to switch into first: the tree is virtualized, so a catalog with a large number of entries scrolls at the same speed as a small one, and Escape closes the details drawer from anywhere.
The rail can sit on the left or the right, and it collapses when you want the tree to have the window.
Command palette
Every catalog, from one keystroke
⌘K — Ctrl+K on Windows and Linux — opens the palette from anywhere in the app, including while the rail filter has the cursor in it. It searches every catalog in your catalog directory, not only the one you happen to have open.
Activating a result reveals that file in the tree, switching catalogs first if it lives in a different one. Two small things it does on purpose: it waits for two characters before it searches anything, and every open starts empty — it never re-runs what you typed last time.
While it scans
Progress you can read, and stop
A scan tells you what it is doing while it does it, and you can stop it. Closing the dialog, pressing Escape or clicking outside it stops the walk. Run in the background is a different choice, not a politer wording of the same one: it leaves the scan running and gives you the rest of the app back.
Before the total is known there is no percentage, and StorCat does not invent one. It reports how many files it has seen so far and the path it is walking right now, and it starts showing a percentage only once there is a total to divide by.
Re-scan
What changed since last time
Plug the drive back in, re-scan it, and StorCat compares the volume against the catalog you already had. It sorts what it finds into five states — added, removed, changed, unreadable and unchanged — and lists four of them; unchanged entries are counted in the summary rather than listed, because a list of everything that stayed the same is not a list anyone reads.
The frame beside this is a scrolled region of that result showing the ADDED and REMOVED groups. The remaining two lists sit below its edge. When you keep the result you choose whether it overwrites the catalog or is kept beside it.
There is no single download-size number here, because there is no single answer: how big a build is depends on how it is packaged, and the range across the nine is wide enough that one figure would misrepresent most of them.
The Debian package storcat_3.0.0_amd64.deb is 3.8 MB, because it borrows the GTK and WebKit libraries your system already has.
The Linux AppImage StorCat-v3.0.0-linux-x86_64.AppImage is 82.6 MB, because it brings its own copies of those libraries and so asks nothing of the distribution it lands on.
Same program, both times. The download page carries the release's own figure beside every build.
Themes
Eleven themes, and the one you already use.
Eleven in all — three light and eight dark. StorCat Light and StorCat Dark are the ones it ships on; the other nine are palettes you already know from your editor: Dracula, Nord, One Dark, Monokai, Gruvbox Dark, and both the Solarized and both the GitHub variants.
Two settings sit next to the theme and change the shape of the window rather than its colour: density, which is Compact or Comfortable, and which side of the window the rail lives on, Left or Right. All three apply the moment you pick them — there is no save step to forget.
Command line
The same binary, without the window.
There is nothing extra to install for this. The program looks at its first argument: hand it a subcommand it recognises and it runs headless and prints to standard output; hand it nothing and it opens the window instead.
create walks a directory and writes the catalog — a JSON file for querying and a standalone HTML file for reading and sending to someone else.
The rest of the set is search, list, show, open and version. create, search, list and show take --json, so that much of it can be piped into something else as easily as it can be read.
An empty result is not an error: a search that matches nothing says so and exits successfully. The docs carry the whole reference, command by command and flag by flag.
Speed
Nothing here we did not measure.
You will not find a throughput figure on this page. How fast a scan runs depends on the drive, the bus and the filesystem far more than it depends on StorCat, and a number taken on one machine and printed as a general claim is a number that is wrong for nearly everyone who reads it. So there isn't one.
What is true of every run instead: the walk reports what it is doing continuously rather than in occasional jumps, it can be stopped at any point, and it can be pushed to the background so the rest of the app stays usable while it finishes. If the drive is pulled out mid-scan, StorCat offers to write the partial catalog rather than discarding the work it already did.
And the totals beside a finished catalog are counts of what was recorded, not estimates.
Download
Start cataloguing in a minute.
Free, open source, and the same program on all three platforms. Pick your build on the download page — every filename and figure there comes from the release itself, and the page carries a command that confirms the file you received is the file the release is serving.
Questions
The things people ask first.
Is it free?
Yes, and there is nothing behind the word: no paid tier, no account, no trial that ends. StorCat is released under the MIT licence, which is also what lets you keep using the copy you have however the project goes.
Is the source open?
All of it. The application, the command line and the pipeline that publishes the builds are one MIT-licensed repository, and you can read the whole thing on GitHub.
Does it upload anything?
StorCat makes no network requests of its own — no analytics, no telemetry, no update pings. That is a measured statement rather than a slogan: it comes from reading every one of the application's own source files, in which no HTTP client is imported at all and no analytics or telemetry library appears anywhere in the interface.
And here is where that statement stops, because you should know its edges. StorCat draws its window with the desktop runtime and the system webview your operating system provides, and both of those are somebody else's code. We have read ours. We have not put the whole running process behind a network monitor, so the honest claim is the one above and not a larger one.
This site holds the same line, and has an edge of its own worth naming in the same breath. It sets no cookies, carries no tracking pixel and runs no advertising script, and nothing here follows you to another site. Cloudflare does inject its own cookieless analytics tag into every response it serves for this domain; this site’s content security policy blocks that tag from executing, so it measures nothing. Visitor numbers come from Cloudflare’s server-side request logs instead, which need no script in the page at all.
Will it run on my machine?
On macOS one universal build covers both Intel and Apple Silicon, so there is nothing to choose. On Windows it is 64-bit Intel and AMD; this release has no Windows-on-ARM build. On Linux there are Debian packages for amd64 and arm64, built for Debian 12 and Ubuntu 22.04 and the derivatives compatible with them, plain archives for both architectures, and an AppImage for x86_64 — the AppImage is the one that asks least of whatever distribution it lands on.
The download page lists every build with its exact filename.
Where do my catalogs end up?
In files, in a folder you pick. Each catalog is a JSON file for searching and a standalone HTML file that opens in any browser, both written into your catalog directory. Move them, copy them, back them up, send one to somebody who does not have StorCat — nothing needs to be running for them to be readable.
Do I have to install the command line separately?
No, it is the same binary. What differs is the name it arrives under: Homebrew puts it on your path as storcat, all lowercase, and the Debian packages install it as StorCat, with the capitals. Same program, two spellings.