Why Has No macOS File Manager Ever Had Dolphin's Follow-Along Terminal?

Dorax writes: Two decades after KDE's Dolphin (and Konqueror before it) shipped an embedded terminal that follows your navigation (i.e., browse to a folder in the GUI and the shell is already there, no `cd` required), the feature has never appeared in a macOS file manager. Not in Finder, not in Path Finder's 25 years of development, not in ForkLift. A Linux-to-Mac switcher and AI professor got tired of waiting and built it herself: Iruka (, Japanese for "dolphin," a tribute to its inspiration) is a native Swift file manager whose integrated terminal tracks every move you make in the UI. It has a twist Dolphin never had: it pauses follow-mode automatically while a long-running command (a build, or an AI coding agent like Claude Code) is busy, then resumes when it finishes. It also brings other Linux-file-manager staples Apple never adopted: dual-pane browsing, grep/regex content search, and batch rename with preview. The developer tells the story of the 15-year wait in a blog post. Iruka is proprietary ($19.99 Lifetime 3 licenses, 30-day trial); the developer says the roadmap is driven by feature requests on GitHub Discussions. (Disclosure: submitter is the developer.)