The original developer sold it to MacPaw, who maintained it for a little while, then their country got invaded by Russia, and they quite understandably stopped being able to update it anymore.

Some of the bit-twiddling it did to make it really, really fast apparently also doesn't work on Apple Silicon, meaning that it fails to display images at all on new Macs, and MacPaw doesn't have the bandwidth to fix it (they don't even sell it anymore on the App Store).

I'd try and fork it, but I'm not much of a C developer. But I do know go, and gitlab.com/cznic/tk9.0 is a really interesting approach to UI toolkits in go that I've been wanting to try out.

So, what comes before Z? Y.

This is being created to scratch an itch for me and only me.

Building it yourself

make why will generate a raw go binary.

make why.app will generate a Mac app bundle for convenient installation to your /Applications folder.

Logo image credit

Generated via https://gopherize.me/gopher/ab6a409adff6140f25080835e82384f25bfe15c5. Renee French designed the original Gopher; see https://go.dev/blog/gopher for his history.

TODO

folder sorting options
skip file load if direction key is repeated
cache loaded files for quick back-and-forth
preload next file for performance
image resizing (maybe)
cbz/cbr support?
build functional mac .app bundle with file-type registration and Open With... handling
display a list of filenames