Sorrel

A fast, modern file manager
for Linux Wayland desktops

Sorrel is a from-scratch GTK 4 file manager, inspired by PCManFM. It's quick with big photo folders, follows your GTK theme, and handles archives, network shares and phones with no plugins.

Sorrel showing a Pictures folder with photo thumbnails, a sidebar and breadcrumb path bar

What it does

Everything you'd expect from a file manager, plus the things you usually need extra tools for.

Thumbnails, fast

A whole folder's thumbnails are made in the background on every CPU core, so they're ready before you scroll. JPEGs are decoded at reduced size: hundreds of large photos a second.

File operations you can trust

Copy, move and trash run in the background with pause, cancel and time left. Name clashes ask first, and Undo / Redo covers almost everything.

Archives as folders

Open zip, 7z, rar and tar archives like folders, even archives inside archives. Drag files out to extract them, or compress to zip (with a password), 7z or tar.

Network and devices

SMB, SFTP, FTP, WebDAV and NFS, saved in the sidebar. Browse the local network. Phones, cameras and USB drives appear on their own.

Bulk Rename

Select files and press F2. Stack steps: regex replace, numbering, case, photo dates from EXIF and music tags, with a live preview and a single Undo.

Drag and drop that makes sense

Moves within a drive, copies between drives. Hold Shift to move or Ctrl to copy. Drop onto folders, tabs, the sidebar or other apps.

Works with your other apps

"Show in Folder" from your browser opens Sorrel with the file selected. Optionally, Sorrel can be the Open / Save dialog for other apps too.

Uncluttered

Tabs, clickable breadcrumbs, icon and list views, search as you type, and a sidebar that only shows what you have. Plain GTK 4, so it follows your theme.

Install

Sorrel needs GTK 4.14 or newer. Packages pull in the GVFS backends for network shares and phones.

Arch Linux, CachyOS, Manjaro

Download the package from the latest release and install it. It pulls in everything Sorrel needs:

sudo pacman -U sorrel-*.pkg.tar.zst

An AUR package is coming.

Build from source

Needs Rust 1.88+, GTK 4.14+, libjpeg-turbo, libarchive and, for network and devices, GVFS.

git clone https://forgejo.tjserver.dev/james/sorrel.git
cd sorrel
cargo build --release
./target/release/sorrel

Make it your file manager

Open Preferences → General and click Make Default. Folders and "Show in Folder" from other apps will open in Sorrel. Turn on Use Sorrel to open and save files to use it as the file picker, too.