File Manager Integration

[justresisting]

Rclone Manager has proven itself to be such a useful project. The program autostarts and immediately after 4 cloud storage accounts are mounted. No fuss, no hassle, everything just works. It's difficult to imagine a time before I had such easy access to my cloud storage!

I am a technology enthusiast with just a bit of coding experience. I switched to Linux in 2018. I've always been interested in file management and the different file managers and a project called Polo always stood out to me.

Polo describes itself as:

Advanced file manager for Linux written in Vala. Supports multiple panes (single, dual, quad) with multiple tabs in each pane. Supports archive creation, extraction and browsing. Support for cloud storage; running and managing KVM images, modifying PDF documents and image files, booting ISO files in KVM, and writing ISO files to USB drives.

Polo is no longer in active development and it was written in Vala so I am not suggesting any kind of integration with it. However there are two other file manager projects that are written fully in Rust and are under active development: one is SpaceDrive and the other is Cosmic Files.

I didn't realize how important a mounted cloud storage drive was until I had one that I could use consistently. A Rust-based file manager that is capable of logging in all of a user's online cloud storage accounts would dramatically increase Linux adoption rates.

I do not have a full understanding of the time and/or work involved in integrated a project like rclone-manager into a file-manager and I do not have coding skills to help make this possible. However I am very good with connecting individuals and organizations to accomplish shared goals.

The questions I have are:

1. Is it possible to integrate rclone-manager into a Rust-based file manager?
2. How difficult would that be?
3. Do you have any interest in this kind of a project?

Depending on your answers and the needs of this project I would be willing to invest time and effort into helping make this possible.

Thanks for having such a great project!

[Hakanbaban53]

First off, thank you so much for the kind words! Hearing that the project is working perfectly and making cloud storage easier for you is incredibly meaningful to me.

To answer your questions, it helps to give a quick overview of how RClone Manager is built. The app runs on the Tauri framework, which acts as the bridge between web tech and the desktop. The UI is built with Angular (heavily customized with SCSS to mimic a native Gnome application). The frontend purely handles fetching data, shaping it for a friendly UX, and displaying it.

The core logic lives in the Rust backend. When the app starts, it spins up an rclone rcd server (a local HTTP/HTTPS API). About 98% of all operations are handled via this rclone rc API, with a few fallbacks to the CLI. The Rust backend also aggressively caches this data to minimize API requests, so when you reload the UI, it doesn't need to re-fetch all your remotes and settings.

With that context, here are the answers to your questions:

1 & 2. Is it possible to integrate into a Rust-based file manager, and how difficult would it be?
Wiring RClone Manager into an existing file manager is definitely tricky. When you browse files in RClone Manager, the data is streaming over the rclone rc API, it's not reading from a real, mounted OS directory. Because of this, standard file manager actions don't map 1-to-1. For example, to mount or interact with an ISO file from a remote, it would first have to be downloaded locally.

The difficulty really depends on the scope of the integration. Are we talking about simple context menu additions (like right-clicking inside Gnome Nautilus or Windows Explorer), or a deeply embedded native view inside a project like Cosmic Files? The closer it needs to be to a native file system experience, the more complex it gets.

3. Do I have any interest in this kind of project?
To be completely transparent, while I love developing this, my core background is actually in System Administration and DevOps. I recently graduated (January 2026) and I am currently in the middle of interviewing for full-time jobs. Right now, I can dedicate a lot of free time to actively developing RClone Manager. Once I land a role, the bug fixes and new features won't stop, but the pace will inevitably slow down.

That said, I truly love open-source work. If time permits in the future, I actually would love to separate the file manager component of this app into its own standalone launcher, perhaps something named "RClone Browser." So the interest is absolutely there, it just depends on my available free time going forward!

[justresisting]

I have been very busy traveling for work but I want you to know that I have read this and just haven't had the time to reply.

Your response is something that I will be able to use when I bring this up with other people so that they can understand the effort involved and gauge your interest in working on the project.

In the next week or so I will reach out to people on the Pop!_OS Mattermost now that I am back home and able to focus on this. I have briefly connected with people there about issues regarding age verification and I will ask if they have any interest in this.

I do not have any connection with the people at Spacedrive. I haven't ever gotten it to work on my OS but I haven't tried in well over a year. I know that they have recently announced SpaceDrive V3. They have a local-first approach to indexing data. You might find the project interesting!

The work you are doing is important and meaningful.

Thank you for the time and effort you put into your response!