Minnow

A simple, lightweight file manager for KDE, built against Qt6 and KDE Frameworks (KIO). Meant as a smaller alternative to Dolphin.

Light	Dark

Features

• Grid and list views, switchable per folder
• Per-folder sorting, independent of other folders
• Places sidebar (Home, Documents, Downloads, Pictures, Music, Videos, Trash), each can be hidden
• Pin folders to the sidebar, group them into your own custom sections
• Mounted drives shown automatically below your pins
• Address bar navigation, back/forward/up history, name filtering
• Adjustable icon size (Small/Medium/Large/Huge)
• Copy, cut/paste, rename, new folder, move to trash, permanent delete (all via KIO)
• Undo/redo (Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Shift+Z) for everything except permanent delete
• Delete to trash, Shift+Delete to delete permanently
• Open a specific directory from the command line: minnow /some/path

Installing

Arch Linux (AUR): two packages, minnow (builds from source) and minnow-bin (prebuilt).

yay -S minnow
# or
yay -S minnow-bin

Snap: snapcraft.io/minnow

sudo snap install minnow

From source: see Building and Running below.

Dependencies

• Qt6 (Widgets)
• KDE Frameworks 6: CoreAddons, ConfigWidgets, WidgetsAddons, KIO
• CMake ≥ 3.16, a C++17 compiler

Building

cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build -j"$(nproc)"

To install system-wide instead:

cmake --install build --prefix /usr/local

Running

./build/minnow              # opens your home directory
./build/minnow /some/path   # opens a specific directory (or a file's parent directory)

Testing

ctest --test-dir build --output-on-failure

Covers the path-computation logic (folder navigation, rename/mkdir destination paths).