Vitaliy Alexeyev

synshell · Desktop · synfiles

File manager

File manager for the synshell desktop — tabs, two panes, archives as folders, network locations, phones and drives, a built-in image viewer.

READMEAUR package: synshell-core-binAUR package: synshell-core-git
Files

Features

  • Tabs and two panes — tabs in the title bar, a second pane with F3; the tabs of the last session come back on start.
  • Four views — icons, tiles, list and details, icon size from a slider; thumbnails of images and videos (HEIC/AVIF too).
  • Preview panel (F11) — a large preview with type, size, resolution, date and location.
  • Archives as folders — zip, 7z, rar, tar.* and others open like a folder (read-only), including nested ones and password-protected archives; “Extract” in the archive bar.
  • File operations in the background — progress, pause and cancel, a question on name conflicts, Ctrl+Z undoes the last operation; trash per the freedesktop spec, including trash on other drives.
  • Batch rename — by template ({name}, {ext}, {n}), text or regex replacement, case change, with a preview; one Ctrl+Z undoes it.
  • Search by name or by file contents, nearest results first.
  • Tags and ratings in extended attributes, compatible with Dolphin.
  • Git status of files and folders inside a repository.
  • Folder sizes counted in the background.
  • Drives and devices — USB drives and partitions (udisks), Android phones (MTP), cameras (PTP), iPhone, files of devices linked with synlink.
  • Network locations — “Connect to Server…”: SFTP, SMB, FTP, WebDAV, NFS via gvfs, with password and host-key prompts.
  • Terminal panel (F12) in the open folder.
  • Image viewer — synfiles --viewer: zoom to the cursor, a thumbnail strip, all images of the folder, EXIF rotation, move to trash, “Open with”.
  • File chooser for the synshell portal — “Open” and “Save” dialogs of other programs.
  • Phone layout with touch control.
  • 14 languages — the UI follows the system or the language chosen in settings.
Icons Two panes, archive as a folder
Icons Two panes and an archive

Install

Arch Linux (AUR) — x86_64 and aarch64. synfiles is part of synshell-core, the base set of desktop programs (compositor, shell, settings, file manager, terminal, software center, screenshots):

yay -S synshell-core-bin      # prebuilt
yay -S synshell-core-git      # built from source

Optional: shared-mime-info (file types), ffmpegthumbnailer (video thumbnails), libheif (HEIC/HEIF/AVIF), imagemagick (rare image formats in the viewer), udisks2 (USB drives and disks), gvfs-mtp / gvfs-gphoto2 / gvfs-afc (Android phones, cameras, iPhone), gvfs-smb (Windows and Samba shares), git (git status), fuse3 (archives as folders), breeze-icons (default icon theme).

The whole desktop: yay -S synshell-bin. From source: cargo build --release -p syn-files in the synshell repository.

Command line

synfiles                                  # tabs of the last session, or the home folder
synfiles ~/Documents ~/Downloads          # each folder in its own tab
synfiles ~/Downloads/photos.zip           # an archive as a folder
synfiles trash:/                          # the trash
synfiles --select ~/Pictures/cat.jpg      # show a file in its folder
synfiles --view details --split ~/a ~/b   # view mode and two panes
synfiles --viewer ~/Pictures/cat.jpg      # image viewer

Part of synshell

synfiles is one of the applications of synshell — a Wayland desktop environment in Rust for computers and phones, built on the syngui UI framework.

License

GPL-3.0-only