v0.20.0
Released 2026-08-19. This release reworks what shows up in the list: hidden items went from one switch to three tiers, and a rule can now apply to one folder only, be written as a regex, or work the other way round and let a single item through. There are new ways in from the context menu and the footer. The icons view gained three layouts that place cells by the pictures' own proportions. Open With became a flyout you can pin your own programs into. The space bar opens Quick Look — the system's on macOS, the third-party QuickLook on Windows. Chinese file names now sort by pinyin, and runs of digits inside a name sort by value. The two factory themes have new colors and new names, and custom color schemes can be kept several at a time.
The kind marked on each entry (New / Improved / Fixed) is explained in the changelog.
New
| # | Kind | Change |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | New | "Show hidden items" went from one switch to three tiers: Hide, Show, Show all. The first two differ only in what they do to system-hidden items — your own rules apply in both — while the third suspends every rule, which is how you find out whether one of your own rules is what made something disappear. Ctrl+H flips the first two; the third is picked in Settings. The Show Hidden Items switch and the separate Hide Rules page in General are now one page, Visibility. See Visibility |
| 2 | New | A rule can apply to one folder only: the lower half of each rule row picks the scope — Global, This folder only, This folder and subfolders, or Choose folder… to browse for one. Every rule used to be global. See Visibility: The four scopes |
| 3 | New | Rules can be regexes, and can let items through: each rule row gained two two-segment controls, one picking Hide or Show and one picking Wildcard or Regex. A pass always beats a hide, so "hide every .log but keep build.log" is two rules. See Visibility: The two syntaxes |
| 4 | New | One switch keeps system clutter out: Hide system noise on the visibility page is on by default and uses a built-in list for desktop.ini, Thumbs.db, the recycle bin, pagefile.sys and, on macOS, the .DS_Store family. The list uses none of your rule slots and needs no maintenance |
| 5 | New | Hiding something takes one right-click: the context menu gained Hide ▸, whose four entries — This item only, All by this name here and below, All by this name everywhere, Hide all .log files — each write a rule for you. The toast carries an Undo. When the item is already hidden by a rule, the same slot reads Unhide |
| 6 | New | Hide by pattern: the last entry under Hide ▸, Hide by pattern…, opens a small dialog with *.<extension> pre-filled and a live N items here match underneath, so you see the consequence before committing. See Visibility: Hide by pattern |
| 7 | New | Partitions, WSL distributions and connected phones can be hidden too: right-click the row in the sidebar's Storage section or in This PC → Hide, and it leaves the sidebar, This PC and the folder picker at once. The Storage items section at the bottom of the visibility page lists every storage location with a toggle each, which is how you get one back. See Storage locations |
| 8 | New | An "N hidden" counter in the footer: present only while your rules are keeping something out of the current folder, counting what the rules hid and never system-hidden items. Click it to land on the visibility page with this folder's rules highlighted |
| 9 | New | Three more layouts for the icons view: Justified rows (every row the same height, cell widths following the pictures' proportions), Masonry (columns of equal width, cells as tall as their picture) and Mosaic (large and small cells interleaved), alongside the original Grid. A layout changes only the size and position of the cells: selection and grouping are untouched, a double-click still enters a folder, and it combines freely with icon size and with grouping. See View modes: Layout |
| 10 | New | Three ways to change the layout: right-click empty space → Layout (offered in the icons view only); click the new layout badge in the footer to flip between Grid and whichever you used last; or hover that badge and scroll, or wait for its panel to open |
| 11 | New | Open With became a flyout (Windows): hover it and the programs that can open the file are listed — the system's above (the current one marked default), your own pinned ones below, and Choose another app… with Manage Open With… at the end. It used to be a single entry that opened the system dialog. See Open With |
| 12 | New | Settings › Input › Open With: pin programs into the lower half of that flyout, either for one extension (.psd → Photoshop) or for every file, in the order you choose. Two more options govern the upper half: Show programs the system recommends, and Show at most 3 / 5 / 8 / All |
| 13 | New | Space opens Quick Look (macOS): select a file and press Space, and the system's Quick Look window zooms out of that row; press again to close. Arrow keys page inside it, and the list cursor follows to whatever you looked at last. Quick Look in the context menu takes the same route. With Space handed over, Toggle check on macOS becomes ⌥+Space. See Quick Look |
| 14 | New | Windows talks to the third-party QuickLook: install QuickLook and keep it running, and Settings › Input gains Space opens Quick Look. Turn it on and Space and Ctrl+Shift+Space swap between Quick Look and Toggle check. The first time tessoa sees it running, a toast says so, once per machine |
| 15 | New | Custom color schemes can be kept several at a time: New scheme…, the last entry in the Theme dropdown, copies the current theme into a new one, up to 32 of them, each its own entry in the dropdown. Click the title in the editor to rename it; Delete scheme is up there too. Under Follow System, the light and dark sides can each carry a different custom scheme |
| 16 | New | Address Bar: Current Location Only: a new switch in Settings › Tabs, off by default. While it is off, going from D:\Photos\2026\Summer back to D:\Photos leaves 2026 › Summer behind in grey so one click gets you back, matching File Explorer; turn it on and the address bar stops at the folder you are in |
| 17 | New | Double-click the divider between panes and the two sides swap: the left content slides right and the right slides left while the divider stays put, and each side keeps its tabs, its selection and its scroll position. See Tabs and split panes |
| 18 | New | Double-click a column divider in the details list and the column to its left fits its contents: the width settles at what the longest entry needs and the columns beyond shift along, as in File Explorer and Finder. Size columns to fit window in the header's context menu now eases into place too, instead of jumping |
Improved
| # | Kind | Change |
|---|---|---|
| 19 | Improved | The two factory themes have new colors and new names: Dark and Light are now Bronze Snow and Sea Salt, with new palettes. Their position did not move, so whatever you picked before is still the same slot; a fresh install follows the system's light and dark setting, mapped to exactly these two |
| 20 | Improved | Chinese file names sort by pinyin: they used to sort by character code, and the code order for Chinese characters is "radical plus stroke count", which reads as no order at all. This matches File Explorer on a Chinese Windows. The same correction reaches the Type column, the group headings when grouping by type or extension, and the first-letter buckets when grouping by Name — Chinese characters now go into A–Z by the first letter of their pinyin instead of all collapsing into Other |
| 21 | Improved | Runs of digits inside a name sort by value: chapter2 comes before chapter10, not after chapter11. Leading zeros make no difference, 001 equals 1, and it holds for numbers of any length |
| 22 | Improved | A long path no longer costs you the address bar: when the breadcrumb fills the whole path area, a small clickable strip is still kept at its right end, so that way in cannot disappear. Clicking the current folder's own breadcrumb segment also opens the address editor now — that segment used to be a click that went nowhere |
| 23 | Improved | Visibility, Custom Commands and Shell Extensions look like one program again: the three pages now use the same card layout, and row hover highlighting and toggle animation are the same across all three. Toggle rows are clickable edge to edge rather than only on the little pill, and long explanations wrap instead of being cut off mid-sentence |
| 24 | Improved | The footer badges' overlays stop fighting each other: with a panel open, the button tooltip moves above the panel so the two coexist; a row covered by a panel no longer highlights or shows its metadata tooltip through it; and the grouping and layout panels gained the same opening animation the view and sort panels already had |
Fixed
| # | Kind | Change |
|---|---|---|
| 25 | Fixed | In the icons view with the details panel open at the side, scrolling down left whole runs of cells with no file name at all, starting from the top and getting worse the deeper you went; only going back to the top or pressing F5 fixed it. "Which cells go on this screen" and "which cells need their text laid out first" were working from different widths — the strip the panel takes was subtracted in only one of them. It needed the panel docked left or right; top and bottom were unaffected |
| 26 | Fixed | Moving the mouse out of the window quickly left button highlights and tooltips lit up on screen; moving out slowly worked fine. tessoa was ignoring the fact that the cursor had left the window at all, and relied on your path out happening to cross a point outside the button |
| 27 | Fixed | Every entry in the activity panel showed a time one time zone early (eight hours early in UTC+8), and the day sections were split at the wrong point. The HH:MM, the date bands and the tooltip's first line are all computed in local time now |
| 28 | Fixed | When a footer badge's panel covered a file row, that row still highlighted and still popped up its metadata tooltip, drawn over the panel |
| 29 | Fixed | On Windows, archiver context-menu entries write the file name into their own label (Add to "AAA.zip"), so right-clicking a few files added a few more rows to the Context Menu Order page, forever growing and impossible to switch off. The name is now drawn as <name> and entries of that kind take a single row — which also stops the configuration file being rewritten on every right-click of a new file, and makes ordering, visibility and accelerator keys actually stick to these entries |
| 30 | Fixed | On macOS, opening a cloud-sync folder such as OneDrive sometimes painted a large X over the whole window until a restart. The real cause is that listing such a folder for the first time means checking in with the cloud first (0.6–1.6 s measured, and sometimes a timeout), and tessoa was waiting for that before drawing the window again. Cloud folders are now read in the background, with Loading… in the middle of the list while they are; and a failure to read is told apart three ways — This location no longer exists or cannot be accessed, No permission to access this location, and This location is temporarily unavailable, the last of which retries by itself |
See also
Changelog · v0.20.1 · v0.19.0 · Visibility · Open With · Quick Look