A fast file manager for modern Linux desktops, with full keyboard and mouse parity.
OdySea is a GPU-accelerated file manager written in modern C++ with a Qt Quick interface. It is part of the Odyssey application family (alongside the OdyTTY terminal) and is built around three priorities: speed on very large directories, complete keyboard and pointer interaction (neither treated as an afterthought), and tight integration with the terminal.
It is a full graphical desktop application — icons, thumbnails, drag-and-drop, context menus — not a terminal UI. The "keyboard" emphasis means every action is also reachable from the keyboard, so power users never have to reach for the mouse; it does not mean the mouse is second-class.
Status: early development. The toolkit-agnostic filesystem core and a minimal GPU-rendered listing view are in place; the richer shell is under active design. Not yet ready for daily use.
Desktop file managers tend to sit at two extremes: feature-dense environment suites, or minimal terminal tools. OdySea aims for the middle ground — the speed and keyboard ergonomics of a terminal file manager, presented through a GPU-rendered graphical surface where mouse and keyboard are equally first-class — thumbnails, rubber-band selection, drag-and-drop, and context menus on one hand; a command palette, type-ahead, and a shortcut for every action on the other. It is local-first and Linux-focused.
- Fast. Smooth navigation of directories with 100k+ entries, asynchronous metadata and thumbnailing, and no UI stalls during I/O.
- Full input parity. Every action is reachable from both the keyboard and the mouse. Keyboard: a command palette, type-ahead navigation, and optional (off-by-default) modal keybindings. Mouse: single/multi-select, rubber-band selection, drag-and-drop, context menus, and breadcrumb navigation. Neither path is an afterthought.
- Terminal-native. Open a shell at the current location and act on selections from the keyboard.
- GPU-rendered. Built on Qt Quick's hardware-accelerated scene graph, with room to drop to custom shaders for the visual identity.
- Focused. A local browser that does the common operations extremely well.
- A cloud or peer-to-peer virtual filesystem, or cross-device sync.
- An embedded web browser or general-purpose plugin platform.
- A drop-in clone of any specific existing file manager.
The code separates a toolkit-agnostic C++ core (core/) from the Qt Quick
presentation layer (app/). The core has no Qt dependency and is unit-tested
headless, keeping the performance-critical filesystem model free of framework
overhead. See docs/DESIGN.md.
Requires CMake 3.28+, a C++20 compiler, and Qt 6.6+ with the Qt Quick and
Qt Shader Tools modules; the build compiles the presentation shaders to
Qt's portable .qsb format through Qt6::ShaderTools.
git clone https://github.com/ghreprimand/odysea.git
cd odysea
cmake --preset release
cmake --build build/release
ctest --preset release
./build/release/app/odysea ~ # launch on a directoryAn AddressSanitizer/UBSan build is available for development:
cmake --preset asan && cmake --build build/asan && ctest --preset asan- Design overview
- Technology stack
- Roadmap
- Development log — current month, with earlier months archived under docs/devlog/
- Contributing
Licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 only. See LICENSE.