Spiral is a file manager for Wayland, written in Rust with GTK 4 and libadwaita. It is also a file chooser portal backend, so other applications open and save files in the same dialog.
It does not depend on any desktop session. You need a Wayland compositor, a session bus, GTK 4.22 and libadwaita 1.9.
Grid and list views, an optional column view, tabs, a places sidebar with devices,
bookmarks and network shares, background file operations with progress, conflict handling
and undo, archives through whatever tools are installed, thumbnails, a Space preview for
images, video, sound, text and PDFs, a details panel, drag and drop, "Open in Terminal",
servers reached through gvfs, the org.freedesktop.FileManager1 service for "Show in
folder" and the portal backend. Pictures are decoded by glycin in its own sandbox where it
is installed. Thumbnailers, the reader of file details for the details panel, archive
tools, the PDF previewer, the preview's decoders of video and sound, and of pictures where
glycin is missing, run under bubblewrap, which is required: they read files from anywhere,
and Spiral has no unsandboxed path for them.
Fedora 44, 45 and Rawhide, from the Copr project sachesi/software:
sudo dnf copr enable sachesi/software
sudo dnf install spiral
openSUSE Tumbleweed and Slowroll, from the OBS project
home:sachesi:software; for
Slowroll the address has openSUSE_Slowroll in it, and on aarch64 openSUSE_Factory_ARM:
sudo zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:sachesi:software/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/home:sachesi:software.repo
sudo zypper install spiral
Debian testing and Ubuntu 26.04, from the same OBS project; for Ubuntu the addresses
have xUbuntu_26.04 in place of Debian_Testing:
sudo install -d /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:sachesi:software/Debian_Testing/Release.key | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/sachesi-software.gpg
echo 'deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/sachesi-software.gpg] https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:sachesi:software/Debian_Testing/ /' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sachesi-software.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install spiral
Debian 13 and Ubuntu 24.04 ship a GTK and libadwaita older than Spiral needs.
Arch Linux: the AUR package spiral-file-manager, built from
packaging/aur/PKGBUILD, which each release tag updates.
The same packages are attached to each release.
just build
sudo just install # or: just prefix=$HOME/.local install
just set-default # folders open in Spiral
just setup-portal # file dialogs of other apps use Spiral
Build needs Rust 1.92, blueprint-compiler, just and the development packages for GTK,
libadwaita, GtkSourceView 5, libseccomp, GStreamer, gtk4-layer-shell and libwayland-client;
running needs the GStreamer base plugins and the GTK 4 sink (gstreamer1-plugin-gtk4 on
Fedora) for the media preview. Details, other prefixes and removal are in docs/installing.md.
After an update, quit the old processes:
pkill -x spiral; pkill -x spiral-desktop; pkill -f xdg-desktop-portal-spiral. The session
keeping the desktop icons running starts them again.
- Installing
- Using Spiral, including keyboard shortcuts and settings
- File operations
- Archives, thumbnails, terminal
- Portal and D-Bus integration
- Desktop icons
- Contributing, including where things are in the code, and reporting a vulnerability
Search walks subfolders and can look inside text files, without an index. Tabs are not restored between runs. The interface is available in English, Russian and Ukrainian.
GPL-3.0-or-later.