Omafiles

A keyboard-first file manager for Omarchy, built as a native Quickshell plugin — not a wrapper around Nautilus/Dolphin/Thunar, and not a layer-shell popup either. It's a real, tileable window that opens and behaves like any other app on your desktop, using Omarchy's own design system (qs.Commons/qs.Ui) end to end: same typography, same borders, same hover/selection chrome, same Nerd Font icons as the rest of the shell.

Why

Omarchy is opinionated by design — one good default per decision instead of a wall of settings. Omafiles follows the same spirit: no view-mode dropdowns, no icon-size sliders, no settings panel. Sorting is a key that cycles (s/S), not a combo box. Everything has a keyboard path first; the mouse works too, but it's not the point.

Features

• Tiled, real window (FloatingWindow) — not a modal overlay, not layer-shell. Lives alongside your terminal/editor like a normal app.
• Vim-style keyboard navigation (j/k, gg/G, h/l), plus arrow keys.
• Basic screen-reader support — Accessible.role/Accessible.name on the file list, sidebar entries, nav buttons, text inputs, and dialog buttons. Not exhaustive (context menus, the palette results list, and a few dialog internals still don't have it) but the main flows are covered.
• Command palette (: or Ctrl+P) for every action, fuzzy-searchable.
• Tabs shown as side-by-side panels — every open tab is visible at once, separated by a hairline divider, not a one-at-a-time switcher. Whichever panel has the mouse over it is the active one: that's where keyboard shortcuts, selection, and the context menu apply.
• Editable bookmarks — folders or individual files, opening a file bookmark jumps to its folder with it selected.
• Mounted-drives sidebar (mount/eject, distinguishes internal disks from removable/USB by icon).
• Network locations (SFTP/SMB/WebDAV/FTP via GVfs) — "Connect..." in the sidebar or command palette, active connections listed and browsable like any local folder. Needs credentials already cached (SSH key, saved keyring entry) — there's no in-app password prompt.
• Sort by name/size/date/type — a key cycles it, no dropdown. Name sort (and the name tiebreaker for the others) is natural-order aware: file2.txt before file10.txt, not the other way around.
• Copy/cut sync with the system clipboard (wl-copy, text/uri-list) — paste files copied in Omafiles into another app, or files copied elsewhere into Omafiles (Ctrl+V falls back to reading the system clipboard when nothing's copied inside the app). "Copy path" puts the plain-text path(s) on the clipboard instead, for pasting into a terminal/chat.
• Rename, new folder, new file, make link, delete (to trash, with confirm), copy/cut/paste, drag-and-drop, extract, compress, and bulk rename all refuse to silently clobber an existing name. Copy/cut/paste/drag show a real overwrite/skip/cancel dialog; extract/compress/bulk rename show their own equivalent (overwrite / skip the conflicting ones and continue); rename shows an overwrite confirmation; new folder/new file/make link just refuse with a clear error instead of silently doing nothing or failing (no choice to make there — there's nothing to overwrite by design). A "still working" indicator with Cancel covers copy/move, with a real percentage and progress bar for those two (estimated from source size vs. how much has landed at the destination so far — cp/mv don't report progress themselves).
• Trash aggregates every active trash location, not just the one under your home folder — anything deleted from another mounted drive gets its own trash there too (standard behavior, avoids copying across devices just to delete something), and Omafiles shows all of them together in one place instead of only the home one. Each item shows its original location and deletion time (read from .trashinfo).
• Undo (Ctrl+Z) and redo (Ctrl+Shift+Z or Ctrl+Y) for rename, new folder, new file, make link, delete, move, bulk rename, and chmod (chmod undo restores each selected item's own previous mode, not its contents' if applied recursively).
• Archive compress/extract (zip/7z/rar/tar family), bulk rename with {name}/{ext}/{n} patterns (recent patterns saved as one-click chips), chmod (multi-selection, with an "Apply to subfolders" toggle for chmod -R), a read-only Properties panel (real folder size via du, permissions, owner, dates — or combined item count and total size for a multi-selection).
• Browse inside a zip/7z/rar/tar archive without extracting it — opening a file inside extracts just that one file to a temp cache and opens it with your default app. Read-only view (no rename/delete/copy/etc. inside).
• Mount .iso files (opening one, or "Mount"/"Mount ISO" from the context menu/palette) — unlike archive browsing this is a real loop-device mount, not a read-only virtual view, so an installer or any other file inside runs/copies exactly like it would from a real disc. Shows up in the drives sidebar with its own icon and ejects the same way as any other removable drive.
• Image and video thumbnails (video via ffmpegthumbnailer, cached).
• Preview (Space): images, video thumbnails, syntax-highlighted text (Pygments), first-page PDF render (pdftoppm), and audio metadata (duration/codec/bitrate/tags via ffprobe).
• Recursive search, "open with", context menus everywhere.
• Every icon is a verified Nerd Font glyph (checked against the installed font's cmap) — no emoji.
• Broken symlinks are flagged clearly (distinct icon, red name, "Broken link" instead of a fake size/date) instead of looking like an ordinary 0-byte file from 1970; valid symlinks show their real target's size.
• Registers itself as the system's default file manager on first load — no manual setup (see below).
• Drag and drop: drag files out to other apps, drag files in from other apps to copy them here, or drag between folders/bookmarks/drives inside Omafiles to move them — with the same overwrite/skip conflict handling as copy/paste.
• Rubber-band selection: click and drag over empty space (including the margins around the sidebar and each row) to select multiple items, Ctrl adds to the existing selection instead of replacing it, auto-scrolls when dragged to a list edge with more items than fit on screen.
• Back/forward navigation history (Alt+←/Alt+→) and preview state, independent per tab.
• The active panel's folder refreshes live (via inotifywait, optional — degrades to manual refresh if inotify-tools isn't installed) instead of only on F5. Mounted drives and network locations are polled every few seconds.
• Recent files in the sidebar, persisted across sessions — opening one jumps to its folder with it selected.
• In-app keyboard shortcuts reference (?), also reachable from the command palette.
• Remembers which folder(s) and tab(s) were open across a full Quickshell restart (not just closing/reopening the window, which already persists on its own) — just the paths, not scroll position or history.

Keyboard shortcuts

Key	Action
j / k / ↓ / ↑	Move down / up
h / Backspace	Go up a directory
Alt+← / Alt+→	Back / forward
l / Enter	Open (enter directory / launch file)
gg / Shift+G	Jump to top / bottom
Space	Toggle preview
/	Search here (Ctrl+Enter searches recursively)
: / Ctrl+P	Command palette
Ctrl+A	Select all
Ctrl+Shift+A	Select none
Ctrl+I	Invert selection
F2	Rename
Delete	Delete (to trash)
Ctrl+C / Ctrl+X / Ctrl+V	Copy / cut / paste
Ctrl+Z	Undo
Ctrl+Shift+Z / Ctrl+Y	Redo
s / Shift+S	Cycle sort field / reverse order
Ctrl+L	Edit path directly
Ctrl+Shift+N	New folder
Ctrl+N	New file
Ctrl+T / Ctrl+\	New tab (new panel)
Ctrl+W / Ctrl+Tab	Close tab / next tab
Ctrl+H	Toggle hidden files
Shift+Enter	Open a terminal here
F5	Refresh
?	Toggle keyboard shortcuts help
Escape	Close preview, or close the window

Installation

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/Percius04/omafiles --enable

Or clone it manually:

git clone https://github.com/Percius04/omafiles ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/omafiles
omarchy plugin enable io.github.percius04.omafiles

Then bind a key in ~/.config/hypr/bindings.lua:

o.bind("SUPER + ALT + F", "Omafiles (file manager)", "omarchy-shell shell toggle io.github.percius04.omafiles '{}'")

Default file manager

Enabling the plugin sets Omafiles as the system's default file manager automatically — nothing to run by hand. On first load it registers both handoff mechanisms Linux apps use for "the" file manager:

• Opening directories (xdg-open, "Open folder" actions): a ~/.local/share/applications/omafiles.desktop with MimeType=inode/directory, set via xdg-mime default.
• "Show in file manager" (Firefox downloads, GTK/Qt "reveal in folder"): these go over the org.freedesktop.FileManager1 D-Bus interface, not .desktop/xdg-mime, and Nautilus normally owns it. Omafiles ships a user-level service file for the same bus name (~/.local/share/dbus-1/services/), which takes priority over Nautilus's system one, backed by scripts/dbus-filemanager1.py (needs python-gobject/Gio — already a dependency of most GTK-based desktops).

This is idempotent and only runs once (tracked in ~/.local/state/omafiles/integrations-version), so it won't fight you if you later switch the default back by hand. If you ever want to undo it: xdg-mime default nautilus.desktop inode/directory, then remove the two files above.

Requirements

• Omarchy 4 (Quickshell-based shell).
• ffmpegthumbnailer for video thumbnails, ffprobe (ffmpeg) for audio metadata, pygmentize (python-pygments) for syntax-highlighted previews, pdftoppm (poppler) for PDF previews, inotifywait (inotify-tools) for live folder refresh — all optional, each falls back gracefully without it.
• gio with the relevant GVfs backend for network locations (gvfs covers SFTP/FTP/WebDAV; SMB needs gvfs-smb too).
• gio, udisksctl, wl-clipboard, standard coreutils (all present on a stock Omarchy install).

Status

Under active development — feedback and issues welcome.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.