headlight: the Google Drive desktop app Google didn't build.
Drive is where a lot of people's work lives, and the desktop experience never caught up with the browser. headlight is a native Mac app for people who live in their files all day: a real window, real keyboard shortcuts, and Docs, Sheets and Slides editable inline without a new tab.
Twenty tabs is not a file manager.
Anyone who runs their business on Google Workspace knows the pattern: a browser window full of Drive tabs, a Doc open somewhere in the middle of them, and no way to move between files without losing your place. Google's own desktop client syncs files but does not give you a workspace.
We wanted the thing we kept reaching for ourselves: Drive as a sidebar, the file open on the right, and the keyboard doing the work.
One window. Your whole Drive.
headlight signs in with standard Google OAuth, the same flow any Drive client uses. Personal files, Shared Drives, favourites and search sit in one navigable tree on the left. Click a Google Doc, Sheet or Slides file and it renders inline, fully editable, in the panel on the right. Office files preview. Favourite, rename, trash, drag and drop and multi-select all work from the keyboard.
The privacy model is the part we are proudest of. There is no headlight server between you and Google. Files go directly from Google's Drive API to your Mac, the OAuth token lives in your macOS Keychain, and you can revoke access from your Google account at any time. We never see, store or transmit file content.
- Built on Electron, shipping Apple Silicon builds for M1 through M4
- Around 250 MB on disk, any Google account, Gmail or Workspace
- Independent third party client using Google's official Drive API
- Intel Macs, Windows and Linux are not supported in the current build
Drive on the left, the file on the right.
A schematic of the one window headlight gives you. Choose a file to see what opens in the panel beside it.
Q2 financial overview
Free in beta, on purpose.
We shipped headlight free while it is in beta so the feedback comes from people using it for real work rather than people evaluating a trial. Pricing for general release is still being worked out, and early users will hear before anything changes. The app, the site and the support inbox are all ours to run.
Ship the tool you would pay for.
headlight exists because the studio needed it. That is a useful filter for any product decision: if the people building it would not install it on their own machine, it probably should not exist.
See it for yourself.
More from the studio.
Tell us what you're trying to build.
Thirty minutes, no deck, no pitch. We'll tell you what we'd do, roughly what it takes, and whether we're the right people for it. Sometimes the answer is no and that's a useful call too.