← Otto User GuideFiles

otto-files is Otto’s file manager — browse the filesystem, open things, move them around, and preview a file without opening it at all.

First version. Files is new and aims to be genuinely useful for everyday browsing, but it is not finished. What is missing is listed at the bottom of this page rather than left for you to discover.

Opening it

Launch Files from the Dock or the launcher, or run otto-files. Other applications can open it too: “Open Containing Folder” in a browser or editor goes through the standard org.freedesktop.FileManager1 interface and lands here.

Ctrl+N opens a new window at your home directory. To open a specific folder in a new window, hold Ctrl and double-click it.

The three views

Pictures, PDFs and videos show a thumbnail instead of a generic type icon. Files reads the shared thumbnail cache that other file managers write, so folders another manager has already been through come up with pictures immediately. Files does not write to that cache yet, so thumbnails it makes for itself are not reused elsewhere.

Getting around

• Double-click or Ctrl+O opens the entry at the cursor — descend into a folder, or open a file in its default application.
• Backspace goes up a directory. The arrow keys move the cursor; Right descends.
• Type a few letters to jump to the first entry whose name starts with them. This selects, it does not filter — the whole folder stays on screen. The typed text expires after about a second, and repeating one letter cycles through the entries beginning with it.
• The sidebar holds your home, desktop, documents, downloads, music, pictures and videos.

Selecting

Click selects, Ctrl+click adds, Shift+click extends. In icon view, dragging from empty space sweeps a rubber band over the grid and takes everything it touches; hold Ctrl or Shift while you drag and it adds to what was already selected. Clicking empty space selects nothing.

Working with files

Copy, move and trash run in the background, with progress and a cancel that leaves nothing half-written: every copy is written under a temporary name and renamed into place only when it is complete. When a destination file already exists you get Replace, Skip or Keep Both, with “apply to all remaining”. Folders merge rather than being replaced.

Undo goes 32 operations deep for the current session and covers moves, copies, renames, new folders and trashing. Permanent deletion is not undoable, and the undo entry says so rather than quietly disappearing.

Drag and drop works within a window, between windows, and in and out of other applications — dragging a picture into a browser upload field or a chat window does what you expect.

Quick view

Select something and press Space. A panel grows out of the row showing the file itself: pictures, text and code, PDFs, a listing for a folder, and — for audio and video — the tags, dimensions and duration read from the file’s header rather than the whole file. There is no playback yet. Arrow keys move to the next file and the preview follows, Space closes it, and Escape closes it before it clears your selection.

While the panel is up it owns the pointer: the wheel scrolls a text preview, a pinch zooms a picture, and a two-finger scroll pans a zoomed one with momentum and springy ends. Files never decodes a file itself — the bytes are parsed in a separate sandboxed process, and only a validated result is drawn.

Opening and saving in other applications

The same code is the desktop’s file picker, through the XDG Desktop Portal. When Firefox or Chrome asks you to pick a file to upload, or to save a page, you get this window rather than a GTK dialog. Save mode gives you a name field with the proposed name’s stem preselected, refuses a name that is not a single file name, and asks before replacing an existing file. The picker never creates the file — the application does that once you accept.

Trash

Move to trash follows the freedesktop trash specification: the file goes to ~/.local/share/Trash/, with a record of where it came from and when. Files on another filesystem than your home directory cannot be trashed yet — Files says so and offers permanent deletion instead, rather than silently copying the file across.

Not there yet

• Tabs, split views, and persisted column widths.
• Network and virtual filesystems — smb://, sftp://, MTP. Local paths only.
• Mounting, unmounting and ejecting devices. Volumes that are already mounted do appear.
• Searching file contents, batch rename, archive browsing, tags and labels.
• Shift+Delete (delete permanently) is deliberately inert for now.
• Writing to the shared thumbnail cache.