Near is a file explorer system aiming to explore fundamental changes to how we browse, find and group files. We are experimenting with unique ideas to guage their usefulness and practicality in the real world when trying to organise and find the files you want.

Clasically file explorers have been a one to one presentation of the file tree of the system. We aim to break that by providing tools to allow users to transform how the files are presented to them: we call these virtual transformations. Virtual transformations are modifications to how the files are presented without actually affecting the structure on disk. For example you can 'rebase' one node on to another without affecting any of the paths on the system. This lets you reorganize your data into a form that is better suited for the job at hand without affecting other processes that may rely on the existing hierarchy established on the system, or allow you to easily switch between different representations of the same files which may be better suited to different tasks.