14 ms·

Spacedrive – an open source cross-platform file explorer

348 points by microflash 3y ago

tanaylakhani 3y ago
That's a really neat product. Starred it.
darkest_ruby 3y ago
Can someone describe a proper usecase for this software? I couldn't understand from the readme
- atoav 3y ago
  What do you mean? It is a file manager. You use it to manage, explore, order your files. It could replace Explorer on Windows, Finder on MacOS or your file manager of choice on Linux. Apparently they also have some special use cases in mind (if you read the roadmap) like multimedia conversion using ffmpeg woth the ability to offload the processing onto multiple computers.
  - troupo 3y ago
    > What do you mean? It is a file manager. You use it to manage, explore, order your files. It could replace Explorer on Windows, Finder on MacOS or your file manager of choice on Linux. It's not. Read their description more carefully: it's a Dropbox with slightly extended functionality.
    - PurpleRamen 3y ago
      Dropbox is a storage with sync-client, not a file manager (even though it does have a filemanager-view). This app is working on top of storage-services, but it seems not to be like them.
- taskylizard 3y ago
  As a centralized file manager for all your dropbox and google drive files? Yes, otherwise nothing really special.
- filchermcurr 3y ago
  Essentially it's an aggregator of file metadata from multiple sources. Accessing the local database can be a lot faster than accessing the data where it actually lives. It also allows for offline access if the device containing the files is temporarily removed. (Well, by access I mean previews and metadata.) For example, I have a gigabit LAN with a Synology NAS, a server with a bunch of hard drives, and various networked machines. Gigabit LAN is pretty slow. Getting image previews of RAW photos on the NAS is insanely slow and frustrating. With something like SpaceDrive, you have basically instantaneous access to those previews, metadata, and Everything-like (the Windows application) search capabilities. I'm really excited about it! I have files strewn about in so many places. Having access to them from a central location, with a single interface, not relying on a slow network, is really great. I might even go crazy and start to organize things with tags.
- Beijinger 3y ago
  Hm. Filemanager inspired by Plan B?
reacharavindh 3y ago
I remember looking at it a good long time ago. They didn’t have release packages for me to play with so I told myself that I’d check it out later when they are ready. It looks like they released an alpha version an hour ago - hence this is on HN again. It is a welcome concept. We have blurred the lines between strictly local files and all the cloud storage options these days. I personally maintain those boundaries and almost never mount cloud storage on my Mac, but my wife(as an academic) deals with Dropbox,iCloud drive, Google Drive and whatever Microsoft calls theirs, because the people she works with shares files through them and collaborate with reviews and such. If a solution like this can mask the vendor specific connection hiccups and quirks and provide a transparent file system that appears local but may be backed by $x cloud storage, that would be a nice boost to her workflow. The key is the usability of such a tool. If the latencies are so high that it feels slower than Finder, then its chances are slim.
quyleanh 3y ago
> After 15 months of development we are extremely excited to be releasing the first version of Spacedrive as an early public alpha. [1] [1] https://github.com/spacedriveapp/spacedrive/releases/tag/0.1.0 https://github.com/spacedriveapp/spacedrive/releases/tag/0.1...
Klaster_1 3y ago
Decided to try it out. After the installation, it asks to "create the library", share the analytics and log in - not exactly what I expected compared to other file explorers. Next, I decided to navigate to a random directory on one of my drives. After double clicking, nothing happened. Opening a dir with a context menu action did nothing too. Turns out 15k files in a directory make it effectively non-navigable. Total Commander and Window Explorer have no such issues. Spacedrive still has to iron out the basic file explorer features, it seems.
- Void_ 3y ago
  Seems like most React apps never think of supporting large amounts of data. Not blaming them - the framework should support it out of the box. You shouldn’t have to understand virtualized lists. I made a TableView in SwiftUI and I can scroll through thousands of without having the slightest idea how it works under the hood.
  - throwaway50702 3y ago
    You can use one of the React-Virtualized components without the slightest idea how it works. TableView from SwiftUI is the same thing - a component that implements virtualization on top of the base GUI library for you. React is not a UI framework, it's a low level reactive library with very limited scope - even the DOM bindings are shipped separately, and it can be used for much more than just GUI, for example VR experiences or cloud infrastructure deployment. Bring your own batteries.
    - jwells89 3y ago
      The issue with the “bring your own widgets” approach in my experience is that it’s unusual for third party widget packages to have anywhere near the sort of depth and breadth of capabilities compared to the same widgets that come OOTB with native UI toolkits. This means “shopping” for the widget with the best tradeoffs for one’s particular use case and making up for whatever inadequacies it comes with yourself (or just living with the inadequacies, resulting in a crappier app), which is annoying at best. It’s so much nicer to just be able to trust that an extensive library of stock widgets will be able to do whatever it is that you need, as tends to be the case with AppKit/UIKit.
edrxty 3y ago
So what's this get you over something like syncthing?
- hobofan 3y ago
  Since when is Syncthing a file explorer?
  - buster 3y ago
    And since when do file explorers come with their own distributed file system?
    - hobofan 3y ago
      Since cloud storage solutions come preinstalled with the operating system. E.g. Finder + iCloud, Windows file manager + OneDrive.
      - graemep 3y ago
        That is because the OS developer wants to push their product, not because it is something users want. A third party cannot decide to provide something users do not want. Maybe they can get it preinstalled on Windows PCs or ANdroid phones. I cannot see MS (Or Google) being very happy with that.
      - pseudalopex 3y ago
        Those come with the operating systems. They are not tied to the default file managers.
    - PurpleRamen 3y ago
      Since always. Technically, any file explorer is accessing distributed storage. First the multiple storage-devices in your local system, later the different storage in your local network, which then grew to support remote servers like FTP, Webdav, etc. And modern file managers have for some years now also support for cloud-storage like OneDrive or Dropbox. Nothing new here, except being an app build from the ground up for supporting this specific targets.
meatjuice 3y ago
I've been following the project for a long time but we still need to package the software by ourselves.
kwanbix 3y ago
I am a heavy user to Total Commander on Windows, and Double Commander everywhere else. I highly recommend both.
- rluiten 3y ago
  I recently discovered Double Commander (I Managed to overlook it for years). Once i started using it I couldn't go back to Total Command or Free Commander.
hobofan 3y ago
It was kind of inevitable that after VC-funded terminals, mail clients, launchers sooner or later there would be file explorer. As someone on Linux (popOS), I also gladly welcome it, as even the best file explorer I know (nemo) could use niceties that you find on Windows or macOS. I'm highly skeptical of the economics of it though. The only way I would see it working out, if their planned "sync" product would be able to overcome the entrenchment of iCloud/OneDrive/Dropbox, which seems like a tall order. As a user I'd pay ~$50/year, but that would take a lot of customers to sustain even the current team size.
- sherr 3y ago
  "It was kind of inevitable that after VC-funded terminals, mail clients, launchers sooner or later there would be file explorer." Well, Nautilus [1] (nw "Gnome Files" apparently) was created for Gnome quite a long time ago now. The company was Eazel and included some ex-Apple luminaries. So money spent on file managing is nothing new. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Files https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Files
  - sanitycheck 3y ago
    OK, that explains why I have so many problems with the Nautilus UI! I switched to Thunar but it's missing some nice-to-haves. I'll have to check Nemo. Regarding Spacedrive... Seems a solid idea but I think their UI goals (looks fancy) might not be aligned with my preferences (minimal, fast, high functionality, no jank).
    - oblio 3y ago
      > OK, that explains why I have so many problems with the Nautilus UI! Eazel was 22 years ago, I highly doubt your problems with Nautilus have anything to do with them.
- kwhitefoot 3y ago
  If you only want sync then Syncthing [1] is better than all of those and doesn't put you data in the cloud. [1] https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/
sandebert 3y ago
It seems to me that an alternative could be to simply pair FUSE with any standard file explorer. https://github.com/libfuse/libfuse https://github.com/libfuse/libfuse https://github.com/libfuse/libfuse/wiki/Filesystems https://github.com/libfuse/libfuse/wiki/Filesystems
- graemep 3y ago
  That was my reaction too, but FUSE is Linux only while this is cross-platform. I am not convinced file managers need to be cross platform. There are plenty that will run on any desktop, IMO mobile platforms need different functionality and a very UI. The real product as described on their website (not the github repo the linked) is that it is a drop box like sync service integrated into a file manager. I think most non-geeks will find it confusing compared to something that integrates with the familiar OS default file manager.
  - sandebert 3y ago
    Yeah, FUSE is Linux only. But for completeness, for macs there is macFUSE, and for Windows there is winfsp. Both of these have fewer filesystems than FUSE, and I've used neither so I don't know how well they work. https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/wiki/List-of-macFUSE-File-Systems https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/wiki/List-of-macFUSE-File... https://winfsp.dev/doc/Known-File-Systems/ https://winfsp.dev/doc/Known-File-Systems/
- drpixie 3y ago
  Absolutely agree. If they think they can make a better file manager, great, go ahead. But including transports in the file manager means that remote data only looks integrated, it isn't actually available to local apps. Or (just as bad) they'll decide they need a copy-to-local and copy-back-to-network mechanism, which will work for some files opened by some apps but not all. Arghh. Nemo (under Linux) does that for some protocols (eg. Android media transfer), and it is very annoying, especially as there are already FUSE drivers for (at least some) such protocols. In practice it means that the only thing you can do using Nemo is copy/move files around.
lionkor 3y ago
Why is this written in React? I understand Rust doesn't have any GUI frameworks (like Qt), but is this the way, then? Is it an adversity to learning something new? You can reasonably write a C++ app or with Qt and write your GUI stuff in QML, and even plug in Lua, Python, or JavaScript as a scripting language. Yes, thats work. Using a browser to render is just an easier version of using a GPU API like OpenGL to build your GUI. Your OS comes with gui stuff, use it. Other than that, cool enough, though something like pcmanfm support adding remote locations as well...? Another question, why Prisma?
- hobofan 3y ago
  > I understand Rust doesn't have any GUI frameworks (like Qt), but is this the way, then? Yes. If you want to build a cross-platform desktop app with Rust, Tauri + React would also be me recommendation right now. Tauri makes it quite easy to drop down to Rust if you need to (for high-performance operations and everything interfacing with the OS), and it also comes with pre-built packaging for the main different platforms. With React you are able to leverage a great ecosystem that has existing UI components for many things (unlike most native Rust GUI frameworks). It also allows you to reuse you frontend engineers and all their expertise when it comes to web technologies (and working with designers).
  - lionkor 3y ago
    Thats a great overview, thanks. That actually does answer most of my question.
- jenadine 3y ago
  > Rust doesn't have any GUI frameworks (like Qt) And Slint? And egui? And the Qt bindings crates? You can say that they aren't as mature as Qt, but they are often good enough compared to something that runs in a browser.
  - threeseed 3y ago
    > but they are often good enough compared to something that runs in a browser You can't make an app that looks even half as good as Spacedrive using QT, egui etc.
kwhitefoot 3y ago
I downloaded the .deb file and installed on Linux Mint 21.1 Vera on a Lenovo T460s $ spacedrive spacedrive: error while loading shared libraries: libssl.so.1.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
- hobofan 3y ago
  Already opened a bug report for that: https://github.com/spacedriveapp/spacedrive/issues/1481 https://github.com/spacedriveapp/spacedrive/issues/1481
woodylondon 3y ago
The old age problem of having an open project where people don't understand what an alpha is. You give this out to the world for feedback and people moan its not working. I am old geek and back in the day you knew an Alpha was just for the playground to kick around - most likely will crash, worse case will destroy you PC but you have a play / provide some feedback and wait for the next release. A lot of other projects do everything in the dark and do a big ta da at the end - and missed the opportunity for the community of "alpha" or "beta" testers to provide some feedback along the way. Keep going - its added to my list to take look once in beta as I prefer to play in that playground rather than the alpha one these days. I like the idea!
- troupo 3y ago
  It's the old-age disconnect between the marketing, the claims and the actual functionality. For example, the title claims that it's a file explorer. However, someone in the comments shows that it fails at actually exploring files. Something which even an alpha project would not fail to do considering the claim. Only when you read through the marketing copy and the comments, you realise that it's a hybrid cloud/local/cross-device Dropbox that creates a view of your files across systems/locations, and only once it's done that, only then can it do the actual file exploring. At least for now.
  - placesalt 3y ago
    age old
    - swagempire 3y ago
      Well, English evolves...
      - troupo 3y ago
        I personally prefer "age old". I was going for the same opening statement as the original comment :)
  - 3y ago
piyush_soni 3y ago
Ok, I don't know if I'm doing it correctly, but there is no way to type some letters to jump to the folder starting with that name right? Also, no Cut/Copy/Paste/Delete yet I guess. Also, the one reason I run away from Finder on macOS is that it has no way to set 'Enter' to open or 'Delete' to delete files, and refuses to simply add a 'Cut' and paste option for files and folders (I know how to 'Move' after 'copying', but that's not the point, the point is that it's just stupid). Please make sure you don't do those mistakes. Keep whatever defaults you want, but at least have an option to enable 'Cut', 'Open', and 'Delete' with their expected buttons.
ysw0145 3y ago
A cross platform file explorer that has a nice UI and plugins is awesome. Many people have more 2 devices runing with different OS. But still, Web techs maybe not a good fit for system tools, for its heavy stack.
wongarsu 3y ago
I like the idea. The vision is similar to Window's Explorer: seamless integration between offline files and online resources like Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Webdav, Samba, etc; fast, cached thumbnails; an indexer for fast search; encryption, backup etc. Of course in Windows Explorer all those features suck to varying degrees, some so hard they might as well not exist. So seeing an alternative implementation is nice, especially if it tries to take all these concepts even further. Most other file explorers stop far short of that vision.
_1tan 3y ago
Finally, congrats on launching!
smcleod 3y ago
It’s a neat idea with potential - but why the need for a login? That makes it feel like my files are now someone else’s.
unixhero 3y ago
I love the name.
nidnogg 3y ago
I've been keeping tabs on this for quite a while. Some feedback: - Indexing one of my localdev directories has taken a robust 35+ minutes so far, and I will likely not wait until the end of it - Like others have commented, latency is an issue (macOS M1 14inch base model). I've added a location and even there it sometimes takes 2-4 seconds after opening a folder to see any files - Am I missing something or are there no tabs yet? - Extremely lean (too much) in the ways of file sorting and grouping (non-existent), although I wager this will be worked upon during development - It does feel like I have to do a lot of work to get to sensible indexing (add lots of locations by hand, and so forth) - I know it's local first, but the way telemetry and login work really does not sit right with me. Overall I'm almost sure it's not a fit for me, as interacting with it was a bit disappointing, but I can see an audience and there's still ways to go. It looks really good. Best of luck!
- nidnogg 3y ago
  Update on this: I actually forgot it on and it was still indexing stuff on that same localdev folder for over 4 hours. :(
  - zestyping 3y ago
    This is really too slow. Using "ls -alR /" to list the metadata of every file on my entire hard drive (13,000,000 files) only takes about 25 min.
netbioserror 3y ago
File explorers really should be one of the simplest tools available in a given desktop environment. Really, there are many tools getting the Electron treatment which should be vastly simpler than this insane upward ratchet of complexity JavaScript dominance has introduced into the equation.
miduil 3y ago
Super nice someone working through this, as it's the perfect target for Tauri, the motivation inside the GitHub makes it an exciting project that goes beyond just a regular file browser. Since it has some glorified web app functionality, a non-tauri web demo with a remote `core` daemon would be super nice.
- jamiepine 3y ago
  that would be our docker version, should be downloadable from ghcr.io
lbltavares 3y ago
spacedrive-bin on aur is exactly 69.69MB
moelf 3y ago
The first screen after "welcome" is a login why do I want to login a file explorer man this timeline is weird
- koolba 3y ago
  > why do I want to login a file explorer man this timeline is weird From the first line of the link: >> Spacedrive is an open source cross-platform file manager, powered by a virtual distributed filesystem (VDFS) written in Rust. You log in because it’s a remote file system. Think Dropbox, not file explorer.
  - awegio 3y ago
    In their FAQ > How does it work? > Using a "Virtual Distributed Filesystem" (VDFS), in other words; a decentralized database that emulates a filesystem. It indexes hardware filesystems to create a master database that is synchronized in realtime between your devices running Spacedrive. > What makes this different to Dropbox or Google Drive? > It is not a storage provider, Spacedrive is simply a database that exists on top of existing storage layers, from cloud services like Dropbox, Google Drive and iCloud to physical devices and external drives you already own. It doesn't provide you more storage, rather a supercharged view of your existing storage. So more like Syncthing? Or rather Windows File Sharing/Samba? I don't really get it
    - PurpleRamen 3y ago
      That explanations read like it's taking in any kind of file system, local or remote, and combines them into one unified file system. Not really new, but most other file managers focus on the popular storage-services (Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, samba, ftp), and are not open source. If you can easily create plugins for any remote storage, not just the traditional file storages, or even make up your own, then it could become something promising.
  - mcosta 3y ago
    Yeah, there. It says "file manager"
Hamcha 3y ago
I don't wanna rag on this project and all the bugs since it's clearly in its super early days, but I keep wondering if there's something I'm missing: Why no miller columns? Not a question just to Spacedrive but really any file manager, it's the main reason I pay and use OneCommander and it's surprising to me how few of them actually implement it, everything else feels a downgrade to me.
- jamiepine 3y ago
  They're coming, we're building all the views!
jmbwell 3y ago
A searchable, browseable meta-index of all my disparate cloud and local, mounted and unmounted file repositories is certainly interesting and has been a bit of a holy grail for some time. Digital Asset Management is nothing new, but it is not a category currently flush with options. Things like Portfolio and <waves hands> Adobe’s tangle of things offer a lot of this, with less emphasis on cloud repositories and more emphasis on workflow and metadata. These days I would have to consider yet another cloud-dependent service very carefully. Self-hosted/on-premises could be an absolute requirement, considering the potential sensitivity of “all files, including local and offline.” If accounts are required, I would want integration with existing identity management through OIDC or SAML (which, you know, does what this does but for accounts). I would also be looking at continuity facilities… if I build workflows around this and it becomes an essential single pane of glass over all my files, I’ll want to be confident in its availability. Keep at it. Nobody has solved all this yet. Good luck!
- raybb 3y ago
  When you said "Portfolio" were you referring to Adobe Portfolio? https://portfolio.adobe.com/ https://portfolio.adobe.com/
brianhorakh 3y ago
What is blocking android release. Keen to beta.
CivBase 3y ago
Can we stop treating "written in Rust" as a feature? It's one of the first things in the README. Whenever I see that I don't think "more stable", I think "someone's pet project".
- cfcfcf 3y ago
  I don't see any mention of Rust on their website as a feature. As far as the readme goes, it seems like a relevant detail to include for an open source project?
ehutch79 3y ago
Does this intentionally have almost the same icon as orbstack?
- cpressland 3y ago
  Glad somebody else said it, was very confused at first.
Night_Thastus 3y ago
A file explorer that could work as a replacement for the Windows native one. You've got me interested. I am curious how much utility it has for those not needing the distributed parts. I'd also love to know if there's any performance uplift or hit for typical operations, like opening folders with either many files, large files, or both. I don't suppose Spacedrive could (one day) show a 'details' view, but with the column widths ALWAYS correct? I get tired of having to do "size all columns to fit" constantly. Especially because it only considers the rows that are currently visible. Drives me up a wall.
getcrunk 3y ago
Project looks amazing! Love the ambition. Have a few notes. 1. Please have one clear toggle for any WAN access. And another one for sending analytics or any sort of usage data be OFF by default. Better yet make them compile time flags too. There was this new terminal called warp(?) that was so sexy but sent data over the net by default and that became a hard no for many. 2. Take some inspiration for Windirstat and everything. Especially everything. Use their search performance as a performance goal! 3. I noticed it in your road map but worth saying again. TABS! 4. Consider moving away from prisma. They really insulate you from your db and a lot of magic. And a part of me maybe unjustifiably is weary that they will do a license switch some day.
aidenn0 3y ago
The HN title really buries the lede; perhaps the full title was too long?
EarthAmbassador 3y ago
Now if there is a way to identify dupes and consolidate, plus a way to instantly preview and dispatch photo libraries to new locations, these features would really answer the need to wrangle data.
- rufugee 3y ago
  Is dupe identification planned? This would be a killer feature and one I'd immediately pay for.
  - antifa 3y ago
    Dedupping beyond hash checks, too. Help find "these are the same photo" and recommend deleting the lower res or lower quality version(s).
  - timschmidt 3y ago
    While we're requesting killer features, https://meldmerge.org/ https://meldmerge.org/ style diffs, please.
Mockapapella 3y ago
Tried it out. Made an account. Looks like syncing between Mac and Windows at least isn't working correctly, on the same network. Really like the idea and am eager to hear about future development.
apitman 3y ago
Anyone know how this compares to odrive[0]? [0]: https://www.odrive.com/homepage5b https://www.odrive.com/homepage5b
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
1udfx9cf8azi0 3y ago
Hacker News is not the best crowd for something like this. Everyone here most likely already has their own optimized workflow for something like this, including me. This is probably best suited for digital creative types who use Windows and Mac and aren't comfortable with the terminal. Animators, illustrators, video editors, 3d artists, music producers, youtubers, streamers, etc. It's not clear to me that that second group wants something like this. To be fair, from your marketing I have no idea what your software does and I doubt that group would either. I get that you're trying to communicate this is a "universal" file experience but what does that mean in concrete terms? Users shouldn't have to install your software to understand what it does. I also don't see them caring that this is open source or works on Linux. At this stage I would totally refresh the marketing and optimize it for that second group. Work with a PR person or marketing expert that understands how to concretely and efficiently communicate the value of what you are building to that second group. I would also take down the source repos and discontinue the Linux version (or keep it private for now, until there is demand) to save your team effort at this super early stage. Good luck
ShamelessC 3y ago
It seems unlikely to me that this repository has as many GitHub stars as it does given the early alpha phase and plethora of (known) bugs. Further, you’re seemingly VC funded which is more confusing to me than langchain or pinecone getting funding- and those projects are AI based whereas your project is very well trod territory. People won’t want this even if it’s free forever. They definitely won’t want it when ads, tracking or a monthly subscription become baked in. Basically, I have no reason to trust you and lots of reasons to distrust you. Nothing personal, but if you haven’t considered this perspective you might want to.

348 points by microflash 3y ago

tanaylakhani 3y ago

That's a really neat product. Starred it.

darkest_ruby 3y ago

Can someone describe a proper usecase for this software? I couldn't understand from the readme

atoav 3y ago
What do you mean? It is a file manager. You use it to manage, explore, order your files. It could replace Explorer on Windows, Finder on MacOS or your file manager of choice on Linux. Apparently they also have some special use cases in mind (if you read the roadmap) like multimedia conversion using ffmpeg woth the ability to offload the processing onto multiple computers.
- troupo 3y ago
  > What do you mean? It is a file manager. You use it to manage, explore, order your files. It could replace Explorer on Windows, Finder on MacOS or your file manager of choice on Linux. It's not. Read their description more carefully: it's a Dropbox with slightly extended functionality.
  - PurpleRamen 3y ago
    Dropbox is a storage with sync-client, not a file manager (even though it does have a filemanager-view). This app is working on top of storage-services, but it seems not to be like them.
taskylizard 3y ago
As a centralized file manager for all your dropbox and google drive files? Yes, otherwise nothing really special.
filchermcurr 3y ago
Essentially it's an aggregator of file metadata from multiple sources. Accessing the local database can be a lot faster than accessing the data where it actually lives. It also allows for offline access if the device containing the files is temporarily removed. (Well, by access I mean previews and metadata.) For example, I have a gigabit LAN with a Synology NAS, a server with a bunch of hard drives, and various networked machines. Gigabit LAN is pretty slow. Getting image previews of RAW photos on the NAS is insanely slow and frustrating. With something like SpaceDrive, you have basically instantaneous access to those previews, metadata, and Everything-like (the Windows application) search capabilities. I'm really excited about it! I have files strewn about in so many places. Having access to them from a central location, with a single interface, not relying on a slow network, is really great. I might even go crazy and start to organize things with tags.
Beijinger 3y ago
Hm. Filemanager inspired by Plan B?

reacharavindh 3y ago

I remember looking at it a good long time ago. They didn’t have release packages for me to play with so I told myself that I’d check it out later when they are ready. It looks like they released an alpha version an hour ago - hence this is on HN again. It is a welcome concept. We have blurred the lines between strictly local files and all the cloud storage options these days. I personally maintain those boundaries and almost never mount cloud storage on my Mac, but my wife(as an academic) deals with Dropbox,iCloud drive, Google Drive and whatever Microsoft calls theirs, because the people she works with shares files through them and collaborate with reviews and such. If a solution like this can mask the vendor specific connection hiccups and quirks and provide a transparent file system that appears local but may be backed by $x cloud storage, that would be a nice boost to her workflow. The key is the usability of such a tool. If the latencies are so high that it feels slower than Finder, then its chances are slim.

quyleanh 3y ago

> After 15 months of development we are extremely excited to be releasing the first version of Spacedrive as an early public alpha. [1] [1] https://github.com/spacedriveapp/spacedrive/releases/tag/0.1.0 https://github.com/spacedriveapp/spacedrive/releases/tag/0.1...

Klaster_1 3y ago

Decided to try it out. After the installation, it asks to "create the library", share the analytics and log in - not exactly what I expected compared to other file explorers. Next, I decided to navigate to a random directory on one of my drives. After double clicking, nothing happened. Opening a dir with a context menu action did nothing too. Turns out 15k files in a directory make it effectively non-navigable. Total Commander and Window Explorer have no such issues. Spacedrive still has to iron out the basic file explorer features, it seems.

Void_ 3y ago
Seems like most React apps never think of supporting large amounts of data. Not blaming them - the framework should support it out of the box. You shouldn’t have to understand virtualized lists. I made a TableView in SwiftUI and I can scroll through thousands of without having the slightest idea how it works under the hood.
- throwaway50702 3y ago
  You can use one of the React-Virtualized components without the slightest idea how it works. TableView from SwiftUI is the same thing - a component that implements virtualization on top of the base GUI library for you. React is not a UI framework, it's a low level reactive library with very limited scope - even the DOM bindings are shipped separately, and it can be used for much more than just GUI, for example VR experiences or cloud infrastructure deployment. Bring your own batteries.
  - jwells89 3y ago
    The issue with the “bring your own widgets” approach in my experience is that it’s unusual for third party widget packages to have anywhere near the sort of depth and breadth of capabilities compared to the same widgets that come OOTB with native UI toolkits. This means “shopping” for the widget with the best tradeoffs for one’s particular use case and making up for whatever inadequacies it comes with yourself (or just living with the inadequacies, resulting in a crappier app), which is annoying at best. It’s so much nicer to just be able to trust that an extensive library of stock widgets will be able to do whatever it is that you need, as tends to be the case with AppKit/UIKit.

edrxty 3y ago

So what's this get you over something like syncthing?

hobofan 3y ago
Since when is Syncthing a file explorer?
- buster 3y ago
  And since when do file explorers come with their own distributed file system?
  - hobofan 3y ago
    Since cloud storage solutions come preinstalled with the operating system. E.g. Finder + iCloud, Windows file manager + OneDrive.
    - graemep 3y ago
      That is because the OS developer wants to push their product, not because it is something users want. A third party cannot decide to provide something users do not want. Maybe they can get it preinstalled on Windows PCs or ANdroid phones. I cannot see MS (Or Google) being very happy with that.
    - pseudalopex 3y ago
      Those come with the operating systems. They are not tied to the default file managers.
  - PurpleRamen 3y ago
    Since always. Technically, any file explorer is accessing distributed storage. First the multiple storage-devices in your local system, later the different storage in your local network, which then grew to support remote servers like FTP, Webdav, etc. And modern file managers have for some years now also support for cloud-storage like OneDrive or Dropbox. Nothing new here, except being an app build from the ground up for supporting this specific targets.

meatjuice 3y ago

I've been following the project for a long time but we still need to package the software by ourselves.

kwanbix 3y ago

I am a heavy user to Total Commander on Windows, and Double Commander everywhere else. I highly recommend both.

rluiten 3y ago
I recently discovered Double Commander (I Managed to overlook it for years). Once i started using it I couldn't go back to Total Command or Free Commander.

hobofan 3y ago

It was kind of inevitable that after VC-funded terminals, mail clients, launchers sooner or later there would be file explorer. As someone on Linux (popOS), I also gladly welcome it, as even the best file explorer I know (nemo) could use niceties that you find on Windows or macOS. I'm highly skeptical of the economics of it though. The only way I would see it working out, if their planned "sync" product would be able to overcome the entrenchment of iCloud/OneDrive/Dropbox, which seems like a tall order. As a user I'd pay ~$50/year, but that would take a lot of customers to sustain even the current team size.

sherr 3y ago
"It was kind of inevitable that after VC-funded terminals, mail clients, launchers sooner or later there would be file explorer." Well, Nautilus [1] (nw "Gnome Files" apparently) was created for Gnome quite a long time ago now. The company was Eazel and included some ex-Apple luminaries. So money spent on file managing is nothing new. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Files https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Files
- sanitycheck 3y ago
  OK, that explains why I have so many problems with the Nautilus UI! I switched to Thunar but it's missing some nice-to-haves. I'll have to check Nemo. Regarding Spacedrive... Seems a solid idea but I think their UI goals (looks fancy) might not be aligned with my preferences (minimal, fast, high functionality, no jank).
  - oblio 3y ago
    > OK, that explains why I have so many problems with the Nautilus UI! Eazel was 22 years ago, I highly doubt your problems with Nautilus have anything to do with them.
kwhitefoot 3y ago
If you only want sync then Syncthing [1] is better than all of those and doesn't put you data in the cloud. [1] https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/

sandebert 3y ago

It seems to me that an alternative could be to simply pair FUSE with any standard file explorer. https://github.com/libfuse/libfuse https://github.com/libfuse/libfuse https://github.com/libfuse/libfuse/wiki/Filesystems https://github.com/libfuse/libfuse/wiki/Filesystems

graemep 3y ago
That was my reaction too, but FUSE is Linux only while this is cross-platform. I am not convinced file managers need to be cross platform. There are plenty that will run on any desktop, IMO mobile platforms need different functionality and a very UI. The real product as described on their website (not the github repo the linked) is that it is a drop box like sync service integrated into a file manager. I think most non-geeks will find it confusing compared to something that integrates with the familiar OS default file manager.
- sandebert 3y ago
  Yeah, FUSE is Linux only. But for completeness, for macs there is macFUSE, and for Windows there is winfsp. Both of these have fewer filesystems than FUSE, and I've used neither so I don't know how well they work. https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/wiki/List-of-macFUSE-File-Systems https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/wiki/List-of-macFUSE-File... https://winfsp.dev/doc/Known-File-Systems/ https://winfsp.dev/doc/Known-File-Systems/
drpixie 3y ago
Absolutely agree. If they think they can make a better file manager, great, go ahead. But including transports in the file manager means that remote data only looks integrated, it isn't actually available to local apps. Or (just as bad) they'll decide they need a copy-to-local and copy-back-to-network mechanism, which will work for some files opened by some apps but not all. Arghh. Nemo (under Linux) does that for some protocols (eg. Android media transfer), and it is very annoying, especially as there are already FUSE drivers for (at least some) such protocols. In practice it means that the only thing you can do using Nemo is copy/move files around.

lionkor 3y ago

Why is this written in React? I understand Rust doesn't have any GUI frameworks (like Qt), but is this the way, then? Is it an adversity to learning something new? You can reasonably write a C++ app or with Qt and write your GUI stuff in QML, and even plug in Lua, Python, or JavaScript as a scripting language. Yes, thats work. Using a browser to render is just an easier version of using a GPU API like OpenGL to build your GUI. Your OS comes with gui stuff, use it. Other than that, cool enough, though something like pcmanfm support adding remote locations as well...? Another question, why Prisma?

hobofan 3y ago
> I understand Rust doesn't have any GUI frameworks (like Qt), but is this the way, then? Yes. If you want to build a cross-platform desktop app with Rust, Tauri + React would also be me recommendation right now. Tauri makes it quite easy to drop down to Rust if you need to (for high-performance operations and everything interfacing with the OS), and it also comes with pre-built packaging for the main different platforms. With React you are able to leverage a great ecosystem that has existing UI components for many things (unlike most native Rust GUI frameworks). It also allows you to reuse you frontend engineers and all their expertise when it comes to web technologies (and working with designers).
- lionkor 3y ago
  Thats a great overview, thanks. That actually does answer most of my question.
jenadine 3y ago
> Rust doesn't have any GUI frameworks (like Qt) And Slint? And egui? And the Qt bindings crates? You can say that they aren't as mature as Qt, but they are often good enough compared to something that runs in a browser.
- threeseed 3y ago
  > but they are often good enough compared to something that runs in a browser You can't make an app that looks even half as good as Spacedrive using QT, egui etc.

kwhitefoot 3y ago

I downloaded the .deb file and installed on Linux Mint 21.1 Vera on a Lenovo T460s $ spacedrive spacedrive: error while loading shared libraries: libssl.so.1.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

hobofan 3y ago
Already opened a bug report for that: https://github.com/spacedriveapp/spacedrive/issues/1481 https://github.com/spacedriveapp/spacedrive/issues/1481

woodylondon 3y ago

The old age problem of having an open project where people don't understand what an alpha is. You give this out to the world for feedback and people moan its not working. I am old geek and back in the day you knew an Alpha was just for the playground to kick around - most likely will crash, worse case will destroy you PC but you have a play / provide some feedback and wait for the next release. A lot of other projects do everything in the dark and do a big ta da at the end - and missed the opportunity for the community of "alpha" or "beta" testers to provide some feedback along the way. Keep going - its added to my list to take look once in beta as I prefer to play in that playground rather than the alpha one these days. I like the idea!

troupo 3y ago
It's the old-age disconnect between the marketing, the claims and the actual functionality. For example, the title claims that it's a file explorer. However, someone in the comments shows that it fails at actually exploring files. Something which even an alpha project would not fail to do considering the claim. Only when you read through the marketing copy and the comments, you realise that it's a hybrid cloud/local/cross-device Dropbox that creates a view of your files across systems/locations, and only once it's done that, only then can it do the actual file exploring. At least for now.
- placesalt 3y ago
  age old
  - swagempire 3y ago
    Well, English evolves...
    - troupo 3y ago
      I personally prefer "age old". I was going for the same opening statement as the original comment :)
- 3y ago

piyush_soni 3y ago

Ok, I don't know if I'm doing it correctly, but there is no way to type some letters to jump to the folder starting with that name right? Also, no Cut/Copy/Paste/Delete yet I guess. Also, the one reason I run away from Finder on macOS is that it has no way to set 'Enter' to open or 'Delete' to delete files, and refuses to simply add a 'Cut' and paste option for files and folders (I know how to 'Move' after 'copying', but that's not the point, the point is that it's just stupid). Please make sure you don't do those mistakes. Keep whatever defaults you want, but at least have an option to enable 'Cut', 'Open', and 'Delete' with their expected buttons.

ysw0145 3y ago

A cross platform file explorer that has a nice UI and plugins is awesome. Many people have more 2 devices runing with different OS. But still, Web techs maybe not a good fit for system tools, for its heavy stack.

wongarsu 3y ago

I like the idea. The vision is similar to Window's Explorer: seamless integration between offline files and online resources like Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Webdav, Samba, etc; fast, cached thumbnails; an indexer for fast search; encryption, backup etc. Of course in Windows Explorer all those features suck to varying degrees, some so hard they might as well not exist. So seeing an alternative implementation is nice, especially if it tries to take all these concepts even further. Most other file explorers stop far short of that vision.

_1tan 3y ago

Finally, congrats on launching!

smcleod 3y ago

It’s a neat idea with potential - but why the need for a login? That makes it feel like my files are now someone else’s.

unixhero 3y ago

I love the name.

nidnogg 3y ago

I've been keeping tabs on this for quite a while. Some feedback: - Indexing one of my localdev directories has taken a robust 35+ minutes so far, and I will likely not wait until the end of it - Like others have commented, latency is an issue (macOS M1 14inch base model). I've added a location and even there it sometimes takes 2-4 seconds after opening a folder to see any files - Am I missing something or are there no tabs yet? - Extremely lean (too much) in the ways of file sorting and grouping (non-existent), although I wager this will be worked upon during development - It does feel like I have to do a lot of work to get to sensible indexing (add lots of locations by hand, and so forth) - I know it's local first, but the way telemetry and login work really does not sit right with me. Overall I'm almost sure it's not a fit for me, as interacting with it was a bit disappointing, but I can see an audience and there's still ways to go. It looks really good. Best of luck!

nidnogg 3y ago
Update on this: I actually forgot it on and it was still indexing stuff on that same localdev folder for over 4 hours. :(
- zestyping 3y ago
  This is really too slow. Using "ls -alR /" to list the metadata of every file on my entire hard drive (13,000,000 files) only takes about 25 min.

netbioserror 3y ago

File explorers really should be one of the simplest tools available in a given desktop environment. Really, there are many tools getting the Electron treatment which should be vastly simpler than this insane upward ratchet of complexity JavaScript dominance has introduced into the equation.

miduil 3y ago

Super nice someone working through this, as it's the perfect target for Tauri, the motivation inside the GitHub makes it an exciting project that goes beyond just a regular file browser. Since it has some glorified web app functionality, a non-tauri web demo with a remote `core` daemon would be super nice.

jamiepine 3y ago
that would be our docker version, should be downloadable from ghcr.io

lbltavares 3y ago

spacedrive-bin on aur is exactly 69.69MB

moelf 3y ago

The first screen after "welcome" is a login why do I want to login a file explorer man this timeline is weird

koolba 3y ago
> why do I want to login a file explorer man this timeline is weird From the first line of the link: >> Spacedrive is an open source cross-platform file manager, powered by a virtual distributed filesystem (VDFS) written in Rust. You log in because it’s a remote file system. Think Dropbox, not file explorer.
- awegio 3y ago
  In their FAQ > How does it work? > Using a "Virtual Distributed Filesystem" (VDFS), in other words; a decentralized database that emulates a filesystem. It indexes hardware filesystems to create a master database that is synchronized in realtime between your devices running Spacedrive. > What makes this different to Dropbox or Google Drive? > It is not a storage provider, Spacedrive is simply a database that exists on top of existing storage layers, from cloud services like Dropbox, Google Drive and iCloud to physical devices and external drives you already own. It doesn't provide you more storage, rather a supercharged view of your existing storage. So more like Syncthing? Or rather Windows File Sharing/Samba? I don't really get it
  - PurpleRamen 3y ago
    That explanations read like it's taking in any kind of file system, local or remote, and combines them into one unified file system. Not really new, but most other file managers focus on the popular storage-services (Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, samba, ftp), and are not open source. If you can easily create plugins for any remote storage, not just the traditional file storages, or even make up your own, then it could become something promising.
- mcosta 3y ago
  Yeah, there. It says "file manager"

Hamcha 3y ago

I don't wanna rag on this project and all the bugs since it's clearly in its super early days, but I keep wondering if there's something I'm missing: Why no miller columns? Not a question just to Spacedrive but really any file manager, it's the main reason I pay and use OneCommander and it's surprising to me how few of them actually implement it, everything else feels a downgrade to me.

jamiepine 3y ago
They're coming, we're building all the views!

jmbwell 3y ago

A searchable, browseable meta-index of all my disparate cloud and local, mounted and unmounted file repositories is certainly interesting and has been a bit of a holy grail for some time. Digital Asset Management is nothing new, but it is not a category currently flush with options. Things like Portfolio and <waves hands> Adobe’s tangle of things offer a lot of this, with less emphasis on cloud repositories and more emphasis on workflow and metadata. These days I would have to consider yet another cloud-dependent service very carefully. Self-hosted/on-premises could be an absolute requirement, considering the potential sensitivity of “all files, including local and offline.” If accounts are required, I would want integration with existing identity management through OIDC or SAML (which, you know, does what this does but for accounts). I would also be looking at continuity facilities… if I build workflows around this and it becomes an essential single pane of glass over all my files, I’ll want to be confident in its availability. Keep at it. Nobody has solved all this yet. Good luck!

raybb 3y ago
When you said "Portfolio" were you referring to Adobe Portfolio? https://portfolio.adobe.com/ https://portfolio.adobe.com/

brianhorakh 3y ago

What is blocking android release. Keen to beta.

CivBase 3y ago

Can we stop treating "written in Rust" as a feature? It's one of the first things in the README. Whenever I see that I don't think "more stable", I think "someone's pet project".

cfcfcf 3y ago
I don't see any mention of Rust on their website as a feature. As far as the readme goes, it seems like a relevant detail to include for an open source project?

ehutch79 3y ago

Does this intentionally have almost the same icon as orbstack?

cpressland 3y ago
Glad somebody else said it, was very confused at first.

Night_Thastus 3y ago

A file explorer that could work as a replacement for the Windows native one. You've got me interested. I am curious how much utility it has for those not needing the distributed parts. I'd also love to know if there's any performance uplift or hit for typical operations, like opening folders with either many files, large files, or both. I don't suppose Spacedrive could (one day) show a 'details' view, but with the column widths ALWAYS correct? I get tired of having to do "size all columns to fit" constantly. Especially because it only considers the rows that are currently visible. Drives me up a wall.

getcrunk 3y ago

Project looks amazing! Love the ambition. Have a few notes. 1. Please have one clear toggle for any WAN access. And another one for sending analytics or any sort of usage data be OFF by default. Better yet make them compile time flags too. There was this new terminal called warp(?) that was so sexy but sent data over the net by default and that became a hard no for many. 2. Take some inspiration for Windirstat and everything. Especially everything. Use their search performance as a performance goal! 3. I noticed it in your road map but worth saying again. TABS! 4. Consider moving away from prisma. They really insulate you from your db and a lot of magic. And a part of me maybe unjustifiably is weary that they will do a license switch some day.

aidenn0 3y ago

The HN title really buries the lede; perhaps the full title was too long?

EarthAmbassador 3y ago

Now if there is a way to identify dupes and consolidate, plus a way to instantly preview and dispatch photo libraries to new locations, these features would really answer the need to wrangle data.

rufugee 3y ago
Is dupe identification planned? This would be a killer feature and one I'd immediately pay for.
- antifa 3y ago
  Dedupping beyond hash checks, too. Help find "these are the same photo" and recommend deleting the lower res or lower quality version(s).
- timschmidt 3y ago
  While we're requesting killer features, https://meldmerge.org/ https://meldmerge.org/ style diffs, please.

Mockapapella 3y ago

Tried it out. Made an account. Looks like syncing between Mac and Windows at least isn't working correctly, on the same network. Really like the idea and am eager to hear about future development.

apitman 3y ago

Anyone know how this compares to odrive[0]? [0]: https://www.odrive.com/homepage5b https://www.odrive.com/homepage5b

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

1udfx9cf8azi0 3y ago

Hacker News is not the best crowd for something like this. Everyone here most likely already has their own optimized workflow for something like this, including me. This is probably best suited for digital creative types who use Windows and Mac and aren't comfortable with the terminal. Animators, illustrators, video editors, 3d artists, music producers, youtubers, streamers, etc. It's not clear to me that that second group wants something like this. To be fair, from your marketing I have no idea what your software does and I doubt that group would either. I get that you're trying to communicate this is a "universal" file experience but what does that mean in concrete terms? Users shouldn't have to install your software to understand what it does. I also don't see them caring that this is open source or works on Linux. At this stage I would totally refresh the marketing and optimize it for that second group. Work with a PR person or marketing expert that understands how to concretely and efficiently communicate the value of what you are building to that second group. I would also take down the source repos and discontinue the Linux version (or keep it private for now, until there is demand) to save your team effort at this super early stage. Good luck

ShamelessC 3y ago

It seems unlikely to me that this repository has as many GitHub stars as it does given the early alpha phase and plethora of (known) bugs. Further, you’re seemingly VC funded which is more confusing to me than langchain or pinecone getting funding- and those projects are AI based whereas your project is very well trod territory. People won’t want this even if it’s free forever. They definitely won’t want it when ads, tracking or a monthly subscription become baked in. Basically, I have no reason to trust you and lots of reasons to distrust you. Nothing personal, but if you haven’t considered this perspective you might want to.