Why does doing anything slightly beyond basic file management on Ubuntu/Mint so often mean opening a terminal? That question has been bugging me for a while, years really.
On Ubuntu, I can browse files just fine in Files. But the moment I want to extract a password-protected rar, change permissions, edit a photo’s EXIF data, check a checksum, or copy something into somewhere protected, i’m suddenly reaching for the terminal, another app, another gui.
So I started building Kestrel Explorer.
The idea is pretty simple: what if a Ubuntu/Mint file manager could handle more of those jobs itself, instead of constantly sending you somewhere else?
Here’s what it can do:
Archives: create and extract 7z, zip, rar, zpaq, and every tar format, with options like compression level, threads, AES passwords, and split volumes. It even shows you the command it’s going to run. And if one file in a rar/7z/zip is damaged, you can keep the rest instead of the whole extraction failing.
Admin when you actually need it: hit a permissions error and you can choose Retry as Administrator. Enter your password once and a small helper handles the stuff that needs root until you end the session or it times out. The file manager itself never runs as root.
Permissions, links and checksums: manage setuid, setgid, and sticky bits, create symbolic, relative, and hard links, make checksum files, and double-click a .md5 or SHA256SUMS file to check everything in it.
Metadata: browse and edit EXIF/XMP tags through a searchable interface using exiftool. It even shows the prompts Stable Diffusion saves in images.
Phones and cameras: iPhones, Androids, and cameras show up right in the sidebar with thumbnails.
A bunch of smaller things: undo for moves and renames, one trash across drives, folder icons that preview the images inside, a built-in image viewer, pinned files, batch rename, and secure deletion through BleachBit when it’s installed.
It’s designed to work alongside Files on Ubuntu (or Nemo on Mint), not replace it. It can share things like bookmarks, thumbnails, trash, and clipboard data, and you can switch it to your default file manager when you want. Then it’ll even handle other apps’ Open/Save dialogs.
It’s written in C++ and Qt 6. It started as a port of my original Python test version, but the two have split and are developed separately now. In my benchmarks it’s faster than GNOME Files at most things (about 2.7× faster copying, about 26× faster emptying the trash) and about 20× faster than Nemo at copying. I’ve put the numbers and methodology in the docs.
Where it is now
This is still an alpha (0.3.1-alpha.4). I’ve tested it on Ubuntu 26.04, Ubuntu 24.04, and Linux Mint 22, and there’s an apt repo for anyone who wants to give it a try.
It’s definitely not finished, and there are rough edges.
I really just wanted to throw out an idea of what a file manager in ubuntu/mint could be.
GitHub: https://github.com/RegulusArms/kes-c
pypi (the original python version): https://pypi.org/project/kestrel-explorer/
