Drag and drop your files directly from the terminal.
demo.mp4
Note: For Arch Linux users there is an AUR package, for Nix users there is a flake available and an official package in nixpkgs. You can also download an AppImage from the latest release.
Make sure you have a C++23 compiler and the latest Qt with the Declarative and Svg modules installed.
cmake -B build
cmake --build build
# install the build/blobdrop binary
cmake --install buildblobdrop [files-to-drag]For more options see blobdrop -h or the man page blobdrop(1).
- Drag files to other applications
- Pipe filenames asynchronously into stdin
- Start drag automatically without a GUI
- Hide the parent terminal emulator while dragging
- Automatically quit once all paths have been dragged
- Auto-hide the GUI while dragging
- Show mime icons and thumbnails for media
- Drag all files at once
- Act as a sink and print dropped files to the terminal
- Optionally keep the window on top
- Quickly open files with a single click
- Respect system dark mode
- Shell completions
Blobdrop implements multiple frontends to drag the files from:
- From a normal window
- Inside a desktop notification, using the
x-kde-urlsNotifications extension - As an immediate drop to a click location, this works on all EWMH-compliant window managers
- As clipboard content, allowing to paste the file URIs to other programs
- As an OSC8 hyper link in the terminal emulator, but currently there exists no terminal emulator that can drag and drop OSC8 links
- dragon - A GTK implementation of the same concept
- clidrag - A CLI-only implementation
- ripdrag - Like dragon with GTK, but rewritten in Rust
Note that none of these alternatives provide a workflow similar to blobdrop's immediate frontend (except clidrag, but it lacks many UX improvements).
