IMO remote mounts is a feature of the OS.
For Linux and macOS, you can mount ssh directly.
Unfortunatley, Windows makes it a little more complicated.
But there's hope. You can use yasfw with dokany (dokan fork).
https://github.com/DDoSolitary/yasfw
https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany
Or mount from inside WSL.
In I still like Sublime Textdokan-dev
dokany
C2015–2025
dokan-dev / dokany
dokany
User mode file system library for windows with FUSE Wrapper
21Distinct people
25Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
6KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
User mode file system library for windows with FUSE Wrapper
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
There is a "sort-of" port (you were correct in saying a "similar thing for Windows"). It's Dokany: https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany Keybase.io and sshfs use it, currently.…
mdip used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- winfsp/winfsp · linked in 3 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:03:16 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year25 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2015-11-11 00:53:23 UTC to 2025-01-30 00:43:26 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 13 | 2 | 11 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Dokany
What is Dokan
When you want to create a new file system on Windows, other than FAT or NTFS,
you need to develop a file system driver. Developing a device driver that works
in kernel mode on windows is extremely technical. By using Dokan, you can create
your own file systems very easily without writing device drivers. Dokan is
similar to FUSE (Linux file system in user space) but works on Windows. Moreover,
dokany includes a FUSE wrapper
that helps you to port your FUSE filesystems without changes.
What is Dokany
Dokany is a fork of Dokan 0.6.0 with bug fixes, clean change history and
updated to build with latest tools.
Because the original Dokan Legacy (< 0.6.0) project is no longer maintained.
Since version 0.8.0, dokany broke compatibility with the dokan API. See
Choose a version
for more information.
The API has then again changed over time in 1.1.0 and 2.0.0.
Benchmark v1.5.1.1000 vs v2.0.3.1000
A benchmark that is testing multiple scenarios repeaditly and sequentially was run 5 times against the memfs sample of v1.5.1.1000 and v2.0.3.1000 in an idle environment to precise results.
The detail results can be seen in this spreadsheet here.
As better threading and memory poll were added in v2, it is expected that concurrent scenarios (like those tests) would be even more highly improved.
A sample of the results:
Create New | +13.55% | List | +60.69% | GetAttributes | +48.78% | Read | +18-42% |
Open/Overwrite | +153.41% | ListExactFile | +131.91% | SetAttributes | +120.91% | Write | +10-32% |
RandomOpenClose | +173.05% | | | Delete | +90.83% | | |
Licensing
Dokan contains LGPL and MIT licensed programs.
user-mode library (dokan2.dll) LGPL
driver (dokan2.sys) LGPL
network library (dokannp2.dll) LGPL
fuse library (dokanfuse2.dll) LGPL
installer (DokanSetup.exe) LGPL
control program (dokanctl.exe) MIT
samples (mirror.exe / memfs.exe) MIT
For details, please check the license files.
LGPL license.lgpl.txt
MIT license.mit.txt
You can obtain source files from https://dokan-dev.github.io
Environment
Dokan works on
Windows Server 2022 / 2019 / 2016 / 2012 (R2) / 2008 R2 SP1
Windows 11 / 10 / 8.1 / 8 / 7 SP1
Platform
x86
x64
ARM
ARM64
Signed Release and Debug drivers are provided at each release for all platforms.
How it works
Dokan library contains a user mode DLL (dokan2.dll) and a kernel mode file
system driver (dokan2.sys). Once the Dokan file system driver is installed, you can
create file systems which can be seen as normal file systems in Windows. The
application that creates file systems using Dokan library is called File system
application.
File operation requests from user programs (e.g., CreateFile, ReadFile,
WriteFile, ...) will be sent to the Windows I/O subsystem (runs in kernel mode)
which will subsequently forward the requests to the Dokan file system driver
(dokan2.sys). By using functions provided by the Dokan user mode library
(dokan2.dll), file system applications are able to register callback functions
to the file system driver. The file system driver will invoke these callback
routines in order to respond to the requests it received. The results of the
callback routines will be sent back to the user program.
For example, when Windows Explorer requests to open a directory, the CreateFile
with Direction option request will be sent to Dokan file system driver and the
driver will invoke the CreateFile callback provided by the file system
application. The results of this routine are sent back to Windows Explorer as
the response to the CreateFile request. Therefore, the Dokan file system driver
acts as a proxy between user programs and file system applications. The
advantage of this approach is that it allows programmers to develop file systems
in user mode which is safe and easy to debug.
To learn more about Dokan file system development, see the
and the samples, especially dokan_memfs.
Build
In short, download and install the
Visual Studio 2019, select Windows 10 SDK component during the install or from the Tools menu &
install the WDK 10
For details, see the
build page.
Installation
The latest official and signed build can be downloaded from:
Github release page
choco install dokany2 or
winget install dokan-dev.dokany
For manual installation, see the
installation page.
Contribute
You want Dokan to get better? Contribute!
Learn the code and suggest your changes on
GitHub repository.
Detect defects and report them on
GitHub issue tracker.
Ask and answer questions on
Github Discussions or
Google discussion group.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
25 sourcesThere seem to be two popular FUSE-like things for Windows: https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany and https://github.com/winfsp/winfsp.
Both implement a FUSE compatibility API in addition to their own API.
A 2016 comparison by the developer of WinFsp says WinFsp is several times faster in performance tests [1]. According to the readme for Donaky [2], since then Dokany got faster.
[1] https://github.com/winfsp/winfsp/issues/19#issuecomment-2653...
[2] https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany/blob/255e4a508b744996191...
In Pex: A tool for generating .pex (Python EXecutable) files, lock files and venvsThere's some discussion here: https://github.com/microsoft/ProjFS-Managed-API/issues/54
It looks like it's meant to solve a much narrower problem than FUSE.
Edit:
Since you mentioned Dokany[0] I'll also throw out a shout for WinFsp[1] as a similar project, too.
[0] https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany
[1] https://winfsp.dev/
In Projected File SystemI lead a project that included shipping a filesystem driver and a virtual disk on Windows.
What I did to learn the lower-level APIs, and perform initial testing on the driver, was write a "mirror" drive. The user-mode code pointed to a folder on disk, the driver made a virtual disk drive, and all reads and writes in the virtual disk drive went to the mirror folder. All of our (cough) unit tests for virtual drive handling used the mirror drive. ("cough" because the tests fit into that happy area that truly is a unit test but drives people nuts about splitting hairs about the semantics between unit and integration tests.)
On Windows, you can implement something like that using Dokany, Dokan, or Winfsp. On linux, there's the Fuse API. On Mac, there's MacFUSE.
Even if you don't do a "mirror" drive, understanding the callbacks that libraries l
Read the rest
ike Dokany, Dokan, Winfsp, and Fuse do helps you understand how IO happens in the driver. Many IO methods provided in popular languages provide abstractions above what the OS does. (For example, the Windows kernel has no concept of the "Stream" that's in your C# program. The "Stream"'s Position property is purely a construct within the .Net framework.)
https://dokan-dev.github.io/
https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany
https://osxfuse.github.io/
Another place to start is the OS's documentation itself. For example, you can start with Window's CreateFileA function. This typically is what gets called "under the hood" in most programming languages when you open or create a file: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/fileapi/...
User mode file system library for windows with FUSE Wrapper
1 points · Open discussionGood call. and it looks like it attempts to be compatible with FUSE 2.7
https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany/blob/master/dokan_fuse/i...
I used to use Dokan based program for mounting ftp.
In Announce Crossmeta FUSE for WindowsDokany, a fork of Dokan is a very active project these days https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany
In Show HN: WinSpd – create “SCSI disks” as user mode processes on WindowsWhile FUSE doesn't work directly, there are userspace filesystem implementations for Windows. Dokany¹ even implements most of the FUSE API.
1. https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany
In XARs: An efficient system for self-contained executablesThere is a "sort-of" port (you were correct in saying a "similar thing for Windows"). It's Dokany: https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany
Keybase.io and sshfs use it, currently. Personally, I love it. I'm sure you're right about performance limitations, but there are very good use cases for it, like Keybase Filesystem and sshfs, where any latency introduced by the driver subsystem is less likely to be felt due to the latency of working with files over the network.
Interestingly, a set of the insider previews of Windows broke Dokany so badly that launching the driver caused everything to hang (hard -- all but the mouse stopped responding to anything, even CTRL+ALT+DELETE). It's tricky stuff, apparently.
In WinBtrfs – A Windows driver for the next-generation Linux filesystem BtrfsSeveral years ago a friend and I had a need to build a virtual file system that was portable between Linux and Windows. At the very least, we attempted to share as much code as possible. It proved to be pretty easy and we had a working prototype after about 30 hours of work. We used FUSE on Linux, and Dokan FUSE on Windows.
[1] https://dokan-dev.github.io/
[2] https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany/wiki/FUSE
In Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File SystemThis is a fantastic project. FWIW, Paragon's extfs for Windows uses either Dokany or the original Dokan, so at least one company thought this was good enough to use in production.
I'll just point out for anyone interested in trying this, expect BSODs: https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany/issues/344.
I'm also not sure how the Win10 Anniversary driver signing changes have affected the project - they're relying on a commercial sponsor for the signed releases.
Alternative: https://github.com/billziss-gh/winfsp
Paid alternative: https://www.eldos.com/cbfs/
There have also been a number of other discussions here, but I should get back to work instead of digging those up.
In Dokany – User mode file system library for windows with FUSE WrapperDokany – User mode file system library for windows with FUSE Wrapper
182 points · Open discussionList of unsupported features and alternatives - https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany/wiki/Unsupported
In Dokany - The windows OS FUSE WrapperDokany - The windows OS FUSE Wrapper
3 points · Open discussionDokan Library (think FUSE for Windows) needs a new logo for their upcoming 1.0.0 release.
https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany/issues/243
In Offer HN: Free logo design for an open source projectShowing the 15 most recent of 25 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.