filescope

A fast, nice-looking file manager for Linux. Browse your files as a spacious icon grid or a detailed list, open tabs, preview with Space, mount drives (NTFS included), and manage files — all with a native GNOME look that follows your GTK/icon theme.

Built with Rust + GTK4 + libadwaita.

Screenshots

Icon grid with live image thumbnails, and a places / bookmarks / devices sidebar.

Sortable detailed list view — Name / Size / Modified, folders first.

“This PC” — every drive as a card with a capacity bar and free space, the way Windows Explorer does it (and most Linux file managers don't).

Screenshots use a synthetic demo folder and synthetic drives — no real files or volumes.

What it does

• Places + bookmarks + devices sidebar — Home and your XDG folders, a This PC overview, your bookmarks (Nautilus-style, Ctrl+D to add), and a live Devices list of every drive/partition.
• Tabs — each tab is an independent folder with its own history and breadcrumb (Ctrl+T new, Ctrl+W close).
• Grid & list views with zoom in/out (Ctrl +/−) — large icons and real image thumbnails (decoded off the UI thread, so image folders never hang), or a sortable Name / Size / Modified list.
• Space to preview — macOS Quick-Look style: press Space on a file for an instant image / text / info preview; Space or Escape dismisses it.
• This PC — a Windows-Explorer-style drives overview with a capacity bar and "X free of Y" for each volume.
• Mount & unmount drives — click an unmounted partition to mount it; NTFS volumes fall back to ntfs-3g automatically when the system mount can't handle them. Eject/unmount from the sidebar.
• File operations — copy, cut, paste, rename, new folder, move-to-Trash, permanent delete, properties, open, and open-with — from the toolbar, right-click menu, or keyboard.
• Background operations — copy / move / delete run on a worker thread with a live progress bar and Cancel, so the window never freezes on a big transfer. Name clashes raise a conflict dialog (Replace / Skip / Keep Both, with “apply to all”).
• Drag & drop — drag a selection onto a folder to drop it inside (the folder highlights as you hover), onto empty space for the current folder, or into another tab or app. Like Nautilus, it moves within the same filesystem and copies across — hold Ctrl to force copy or Shift to force move. Interoperates with other apps via text/uri-list.
• System clipboard — Copy / Cut / Paste use the real desktop clipboard (x-special/gnome-copied-files + text/uri-list), so you can copy in filescope and paste in Files/Nautilus (and vice-versa).
• Theming — file icons follow your icon theme; libadwaita follows the system light/dark preference and accent colour.

Keyboard shortcuts

Alt+← / Alt+→ / Alt+↑	Back / Forward / Up
Enter / double-click	Open
Space	Preview (Quick Look)
Ctrl+C / Ctrl+X / Ctrl+V	Copy / Cut / Paste
F2	Rename
Delete / Shift+Delete	Trash / Delete permanently
Ctrl+Shift+N	New folder
Ctrl+T / Ctrl+W	New tab / Close tab
Ctrl+A	Select all
Ctrl+H	Show hidden files
Ctrl+D	Bookmark this folder
Ctrl++ / Ctrl+-	Zoom in / out
Ctrl+L	Edit path
F5 / Ctrl+R	Refresh

Install (prebuilt — no build tools needed)

Grab the latest tarball from the Releases page and run its installer. You only need a modern GNOME desktop (GTK 4.16+ / libadwaita 1.5+ runtime, e.g. GNOME 46+) — no compiler, no Rust, no -dev packages:

tar -xzf filescope-*-x86_64-linux.tar.gz
cd filescope-*-x86_64-linux
./install.sh          # installs to ~/.local, no root

Then search filescope in the Activities Overview, or run filescope. Prefer not to install? Just run ./filescope from the extracted folder. Remove it with ./install.sh --uninstall.

Mounting NTFS drives via the fallback path uses ntfs-3g (and pkexec for the auth prompt) — install the ntfs-3g package if your distro doesn't ship it.

Build & run

Building from source requires the GTK4 and libadwaita development packages:

sudo apt-get install -y build-essential pkg-config libgtk-4-dev libadwaita-1-dev

Then:

cargo run                       # launch (opens This PC)
cargo run -- ~/Downloads        # launch and open a folder
cargo build --release

Install as a desktop app (from source)

./install.sh             # build in release + install the launcher and icon
./install.sh --uninstall # remove them again

This builds the release binary and drops it, a .desktop launcher, and the app icon under your per-user XDG directories (~/.local/bin, ~/.local/share/applications, ~/.local/share/icons) — no root required. The launcher uses the app's own ID (dev.filescope.Filescope) and registers filescope as a folder handler, so you can also Open With → filescope on a folder.

Test

cargo test

Capturing a screenshot

Set FILESCOPE_SHOT to render the window to a PNG in-process and exit — handy on systems where the compositor blocks normal screenshots. FILESCOPE_SHOT_VIEW (grid | list | computer) picks the view, and FILESCOPE_DEMO=1 swaps in synthetic drives so nothing real is captured:

FILESCOPE_SHOT=/tmp/grid.png FILESCOPE_SHOT_VIEW=grid FILESCOPE_DEMO=1 \
  cargo run -- /path/to/a/demo/folder

License

filescope is free software, licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later (GPL-3.0-or-later). See LICENSE for the full text.

Copyright (C) 2026 filescope contributors