Flea is a free and open source file manager built for Omarchy by a developer who goes by GM. It first appeared on GitHub in early September 2026. It is meant to be run from the keyboard, the mouse works too, and it takes its colors from your Omarchy theme. Omarchy ships with Nautilus, the file manager from GNOME, and Flea can replace it for folders, the file manager shortcut, and the file dialogs in other apps.
This guide covers Flea 0.4.0, which replaced the whole window with a new program and kept the layout close to what it was. The window modes and most new features below ran on Omarchy 4.5.0 with Flea 0.4.0-1. The copy and extract steps and the PDF, Trash, and key preset screenshots come from our first run on version 0.3.5-2. Install sizes, the removal steps, the PDF keys and archive listing, 3D pan and zoom, and the STEP and PDF search failures come from 0.4.0 in a virtual machine. This is the written companion to our Flea 0.4.0 video, embedded above.
Which channel has Flea 0.4.0
On November 5, 2026, all three Omarchy channels carried Omarchy 4.5.0-3, so Glassy Windows is on all of them. Flea 0.4.0-1 was on the Edge channel only, and the stable and RC channels carried Flea 0.3.12-1. GM’s 0.4.0 release came out on November 3.
So on a channel still at 0.3.12, the install command below gives you 0.3.12. That version already has much of this guide, and the release list near the end shows what each version added. Flea’s install notes say a release reaches the repository a day or more after it ships, and that omarchy update keeps it current. GM posted on November 3 that the other channels should follow after 24 hours, and they had not moved on November 5. To check what your channel offers, run:
pacman -Si fleaSwitching a whole system to Edge for a file manager is a big step, since Edge is a development channel. If you do it, make a snapshot first. Our guide to Omarchy snapshots and rollback covers that. We ran the Edge package of Flea on a 4.5.0 system and did not test 0.4.0 on the stable channel.
Omarchy’s default file manager may change
On September 11, 2026, David Heinemeier Hansson, who created Omarchy, posted on X that “the days of Nautilus as the default file manager in Omarchy are numbered.” He named Flea as one of several attempts at a successor, not as his pick. On Omarchy 4.5.0, Nautilus was still the default until we changed it, so Flea remains an optional install.
What you need
You need a working Omarchy install and a terminal. Omarchy uses the Super key for most shortcuts; on a PC keyboard that is the Windows key. If the Omarchy shortcuts are new to you, our list of Omarchy shortcuts to learn first covers the terminal, the launcher, and closing windows.
The Flea package depends on the omarchy package, so it installs on Omarchy and not on plain Arch Linux. Flea itself runs without root, and the changes it makes when you set it as the default are files in your home folder.
Install Flea from Omarchy’s repository
Press super enter to open a terminal, then run:
omarchy pkg add fleaThis installs Flea from Omarchy’s own package repository, and the package is signed by the Omarchy team. Version 0.4.0 is much larger than the versions before it: about 25 MiB to download and 64 MiB installed. Eight small helper packages came with it, for about 88 MiB in all. When it finishes, press super w to close the terminal.
The older flea-bin package in the AUR is gone, and Flea’s notes say it has no AUR package now. If you still have flea-bin or flea-git, run sudo pacman -S flea and answer y when pacman asks to remove the old package. omarchy pkg add flea cannot make that swap.
Open Flea and move around with the keyboard
Press super alt space for the app launcher, type flea, and press enter . Flea opens on your home folder, with your places listed on the left.
Flea uses the same movement keys as Vim. j moves down and k moves up. l opens a folder and h goes up one folder.
There are four views. ctrl 1 is the list, ctrl 2 is columns, ctrl 3 is the grid, and ctrl 4 is two panes. In the grid, h and l move sideways between photos instead of up and into folders, so switch back to the list before you press h . Holding ctrl while you scroll zooms the grid, from six small tiles across to three large ones on our screen.
The space bar opens Quick Look, a large preview of the file under the cursor. In Quick Look, j steps to the next file and k to the previous one without closing the preview, and esc closes it. The right arrow key does not step between photos, so use j and k .
Change how Flea looks with Omarchy’s window modes
Flea has no window mode setting of its own. It follows Omarchy’s, and each change reaches an open Flea window with no restart. Press super space for the Omarchy menu, then go to Appearance, Windows, and Window Opacity. There is no shortcut for these three choices, and the same switch is available as a command, such as omarchy hyprland window transparency glassy.
The menu cuts off the middle row at “Transparent Windo…”, and that row is Transparent Windows.
| Mode | Where to set it | What Flea does |
|---|---|---|
| Opaque Windows | Appearance, Windows, Window Opacity | Fully solid |
| Transparent Windows (the default) | Same menu | 98.5% solid with focus and 96% without, so only a faint ghost of the wallpaper comes through |
| Glassy Windows (new with Omarchy 4.5) | Same menu | The wallpaper shows blurred through the list, sidebar, and toolbar, and the text stays bright |
| Glassy Bar or Clear Bar | Appearance, Menu Bar, Bar Background | Changes the top bar, not Flea. Double-clicking an empty part of the bar also cycles it |
| Rounded Corners | Appearance, Windows, Window Corners | Flea’s background rounds with the window border |
| Full screen | super f | Covers the top bar, and the blur still shows |
| Scrolling or floating layout | super l steps through the layouts | Floating gives Flea a title bar and the dock appears. Dragging Flea’s toolbar moves the window |
In Glassy Windows, only Flea’s background lets the wallpaper in. Flea lowered its background to about 75% and lifted its text colors, while the window itself stayed at full opacity, so the text does not fade. Text in an unfocused window looked the same as in a focused one, and only the border changed. Hyprland draws the blur. All four views go see-through. Quick Look, the m menu, and the file picker stay solid.
With a terminal beside it at half the screen, the Modified column drops away and the file names keep their space.
Flea takes its colors from your theme, and a theme change recolors an open window. Go to Appearance, then Theme. We tried Glassy Windows on Tokyo Night, Starship, Catppuccin Latte, Gruvbox, Kanagawa, and Matte Black, and Flea was see-through on all six. Catppuccin Latte is a light theme, so Flea flips to dark text.
Blur costs a little power. Scrolling a 3,000-row list on our Intel N100 mini PC drew about 0.65 W more at the CPU package in Glassy than in Transparent (3.64 W against about 3 W), with no difference at idle. We did not measure frame rate. For other apps in this mode, see our guide to Omarchy’s Glassy, Transparent, and Opaque windows.
To set how see-through Flea’s background is yourself, add background-alpha under a [flea] heading in ~/.config/omarchy/shell.toml, where 1 is solid. At 0.34 in Transparent Windows we got a sharp wallpaper and text that was hard to read, because blur only comes on with Glassy Windows or Glassy Bar. In Glassy Windows the same value was blurred. The value also overrode Opaque Windows.
Preview 3D models and G-code
Press the space bar on a 3D file and Quick Look draws the model on a grid, like a printer’s build plate, turning slowly by itself. A left drag moves the view and stops the turning. A middle drag pans, the wheel zooms, and 0 resets the view and starts the turning again. The header shows the model’s size, which tells you if it fits your printer: our Curiosity rover parts read 196.3 × 96.7 × 32.5 mm.
STL, OBJ, 3MF, AMF, PLY, and G-code files all opened for us, with nothing extra to install. The rover and Hubble models came from NASA’s 3D Resources, we sliced their G-code with PrusaSlicer, and the other test files are our own. A very small model draws as a dot, because the plate does not shrink to fit it. Flea’s release notes also list STEP files, but our test STEP file gave “This file could not be read.”
G-code is the list of moves a 3D printer follows, layer by layer. Flea draws those moves as thin lines and shows the print time in the header, here 2 h 03 min for our Hubble model. The slider at the bottom cuts the model at any layer.
Preview notes, tables, PDFs, and archives with Quick Look
Markdown files now open rendered, with real headings, bold text, tables, and task boxes. Mermaid diagrams, which are written as lines of text inside a note, come out drawn. Press r to flip to the line-numbered source and back.
A CSV or TSV file opens as a real table, with a row count in the header. A JSON file comes out formatted and colored, even when the file itself is one long line. A font file shows a sample sentence at three sizes. On a photo, the plus and minus keys zoom and 0 resets the zoom.
On a PDF, l or the right arrow turns to the next page and h goes back. e expands the preview to fill the window, and one press of esc closes both.
On a ZIP file, the space bar lists what is inside and how big it is unpacked, on a line such as “13 entries · 2.1 MB unpacked”.
Extract an archive, then trash and undo
To unpack a ZIP, press esc to close the preview, then m to open the menu for that file, and pick Extract. The files land in a new folder named after the archive, the cursor moves onto it, and the status bar says “Archive written.”
Deleting has no confirmation step. Pressing d twice sends the item under the cursor straight to the Trash. The status bar then reads “Moved 1 item to Trash · z undoes”, and pressing z brings it back. Dragging a file onto Trash in the sidebar does the same. If you are used to a confirmation dialog, read the status line after each delete.
Copy and move files
Open the folder with the files, press v to start a selection, and press shift j to grow it one file at a time. Three presses gave us four scans, and the status bar read “4 of 6 selected”. y copies them, and the status bar tells you that p pastes.
The colon key : opens the path bar with the current path selected, so whatever you type replaces it. We typed ~/Documents/Taxes 2025, pressed enter to go there, and pressed p to paste the four scans. If you paste files that already exist in the folder, Flea asks what to do, with Cancel, Skip, Keep Both, and Replace. The path bar can also jump to a folder by name, but on our clean install that matched a folder only once it was in the history of zoxide, the tool that remembers folders you visit from the terminal. Browsing to it in Flea did not add it.
ctrl 4 shows two panes side by side. Drag a file from one pane to a folder in the other and the row reads “move here”, with the footer saying what will happen and that ctrl copies and shift moves. After the drop, the status bar reads “Moved 1 item · z undoes”.
Find files by name, by contents, and by tag
Press f to search from the current folder. Results show up and re-rank as you type, each with its folder beside it, and typos are forgiven once the search term has four or more letters. We typed kitchne and kitchen-renovation-budget.txt still came up. enter keeps the results, a second enter shows the file in its folder, and esc returns to where you were. For a quick filter of the folder you are in, / narrows the listing as you type.
ctrl g searches inside files. Each result shows the file with the matching line under it and the word highlighted, so you can tell which note said something without opening each one. It handles text files only: a word inside a normal PDF, DOCX, or ODT gave “Nothing matches” in our test.
Tags are colored marks you put on files. Select files with v , press shift t , then 1 for Red; the other keys give Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, and Gray. The menu stays open, so press esc twice to leave it. In the search, tag:red lists every red file with its folder beside it. Settings has a Show tags switch under Places that adds a TAGS list to the sidebar. Tags need a filesystem that supports them, and btrfs, the one Omarchy uses, took them.
A folder can also open in place. In the list view, ctrl shows what is inside right there in the list, and ctrl closes it.
Rename, combine, and convert many files
Select several files and press r to open a box called Rename 6 Items, or whatever your count is. Type what to find and what to replace it with, and the new names update before anything changes. Click the Rename 6 button to apply them, and z undoes the whole rename. Edit in Terminal… opens all the new names in your editor instead. After you save and quit, click the Rename button: pressing enter there opened the editor again for us.
Combine Images, in the m menu with images selected, joins them into one file with a live preview. You pick Row, Column, or Grid, a format of PNG, JPEG, WebP, or PDF, and the spacing and background. Our six scans became one PDF.
Convert, in the same menu, writes copies in JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, HEIC, TIFF, BMP, or PDF, with a Remove metadata option. The originals stay. z does not undo a Convert: when we tried, it undid an earlier action instead.
Compare files, see Git status, and open an agent
With two text files selected, press m and pick Compare. Flea shows the changed lines in red and green, and y copies a patch.
Press , for Settings and turn on Show Git status under View. Inside a repository, Flea puts a small mark beside each changed file, such as M for modified or ? for new, and the path bar adds the branch and a count, such as master · 3 changed.
shift a opens an AI coding agent beside Flea, in the folder you are looking at. The first press asks which agent to use, from a list that includes Amp, Claude, Codex, and Copilot. Picking Claude on our install asked for a password to run an install helper. We stopped at Claude Code’s question about trusting the folder.
Flea also runs inside a terminal. flea --tui starts it as three columns of text, and flea --tui ~/Models starts it in that folder. The space bar still shows a 3D model, drawn right in the terminal, and q quits.
A few smaller things also worked for us. Drag across text in a Markdown preview and copy it. Press p with an image on the clipboard and Flea creates a file from it. ? opens a sheet of keys you can search by typing. Double-click a script and a card tells you it is a program and offers Open as Text or Run in Terminal. Downloads opens newest first, and an ISO file gets a Flash to Drive row in the m menu, which we did not run.
Change keys and languages
To change the letter keys, press the comma key , to open Settings and click Keys. Flea has key presets for Vim, Mac, and Windows, next to the default one.
Flea comes in fifty languages and follows Omarchy’s language setting, with no restart. Omarchy’s own card says to restart open apps, but Flea changed in place when we ran omarchy language ar, and omarchy language en brought it back. Arabic reads right to left, so the whole window mirrors, menus included. This needs Omarchy’s language files, which version 4.0.6 does not have and 4.5 does.
Flea’s default keys
This table uses the Default preset; the Vim, Mac, and Windows presets change some of these keys.
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
| j / k | Move down / up |
| l / h | Open a folder / go up one folder (list view) |
| g / shift g | Jump to the first / last file |
| ctrl 1 / ctrl 2 / ctrl 3 / ctrl 4 | List / columns / grid / two panes |
| ctrl / ctrl | Open / close a folder in place |
| space | Quick Look; in the file picker, mark a file |
| r in Quick Look | Rendered or source view |
| l and e in a PDF preview | Next page, fill the window |
| esc | Close the preview or dialog |
| m | Menu for the file under the cursor (Extract, Compare, Convert, and more) |
| r | Rename; bulk rename with several files selected |
| shift t | Tags menu |
| d d | Move to the Trash, no confirmation |
| z | Undo |
| v , then shift j | Start a selection, then grow it |
| y / p | Copy / paste |
| : | Path bar |
| f / ctrl g | Search names / search inside text files |
| shift a | Open an agent in this folder |
| , | Settings |
| ? | Key sheet |
Flea 0.4.0 opened 100,000 files in 0.70 seconds, down from 1.01
Flea 0.3 drew its window with Qt’s QML inside Quickshell. Version 0.4.0 draws it with a new Rust program, flea-gui, on GPUI, the toolkit from the makers of the Zed editor. GM said “GPUI performs twice as fast as my QML build and renders text much better on low-DPI displays.” Both versions already drew on the GPU, so that is not what changed.
We timed the opening on an Intel N100 mini PC (a GMKtec NucBox G2): a folder of 100,000 empty files, ten opens per app, with the system’s file cache cleared before each one so that no app got a head start.
sudo sh -c 'sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches'We timed each open from a 60 fps recording made on a second computer, so recording put no load on the N100. Settled means the first frame after which the screen stops changing, and for Nautilus that is when its icons are drawn.
| App | First window | Settled list (median of 10) | Fastest to slowest | Memory, 6 s in |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flea 0.3.12-1 | 0.63 s | 1.01 s | 0.93 to 1.05 s | 77.1 MiB |
| Flea 0.4.0-1 | 0.38 s | 0.70 s | 0.68 to 0.72 s | 58.3 MiB |
| Nautilus 51.1, for reference | 0.85 s | 5.17 s | 5.02 to 6.08 s | 235.1 MiB |
With a warm cache, over five runs, the settled time went from 0.70 s on 0.3.12 to 0.45 s on 0.4.0. These numbers come from one machine and one folder of empty files, so a folder of real photos, or a faster machine, will give different numbers. An earlier version of this guide reported 0.63 s for Flea 0.3.5-2, timed with a different setup, so do not set that beside these.
We measured opening a folder and nothing else. GM’s own scrolling test, on a 120 Hz screen, reports 36 frames a second on 0.3.12 and 70 on 0.4.0, and the Flea README has more benchmark tables from GM, on a pre-release build. We did not repeat those.
Make Flea the default with flea —default
To keep Flea, open a terminal and run these two commands. The first makes the changes, and the second restarts the service behind file dialogs, which reads its settings only at startup.
flea --default
systemctl --user restart xdg-desktop-portalIt sets Flea as the app for folders, for super shift f (Omarchy’s file manager shortcut), and for file dialogs in other apps. The output lists each change, names that restart, and ends with the line “undo both with: flea —default off”. After that, super shift f opens Flea instead of Nautilus. Run it in a terminal on the desktop: over plain SSH, it stops with “The desktop is unknown”. To change only the file dialogs, Flea has flea --picker and flea --picker off.
To try a file dialog, we opened a simple upload page in the browser and clicked Choose Files. Flea’s own picker opened, titled “Open Files”, instead of the usual dialog. It starts in the list view with plain icons. ctrl 3 switches to a grid with real thumbnails, and Flea remembers that choice for the next dialog. The space bar marks a photo, the button changes to “Open 3”, and enter sends them. The page then said “3 files”.
Switch back to Nautilus
To go back, run:
flea --default off
systemctl --user restart xdg-desktop-portalThe first command removes each change that flea --default made, and the second restarts the file dialog service. super shift f opens Nautilus again, and file dialogs go back to the usual one.
Remove Flea and its leftover folders
Run flea --default off first if Flea is still the default. Removing the package does not undo those settings, and a leftover setting can break “Show in folder” in other apps until you delete it. Then remove Flea:
omarchy pkg drop fleaIt removed Flea and the eight packages it brought with it, and it printed a note about what stays behind. Flea’s settings and cache folders stay in your home folder, so delete them:
rm -rf ~/.config/flea ~/.local/state/flea ~/.cache/flearm -rf deletes those folders and everything in them without asking, so check the paths before you press enter . If you used Flea’s Shelf plugin, it keeps your ZIP files in ~/.local/state/omarchy/flea-shelf/, so save anything you want from there first. Flea’s install notes list what else to delete.
What did not work for us
The search inside files reads text files only, and Convert has no undo, as noted above. Beyond those, a few things failed on our machine, and the first two are in Flea’s 0.4.0 release notes:
- Dragging a tab out of the window. The whole Flea window vanished mid-drag, in both of our tries, and the process stayed alive with no window. Right-click the tab and pick Move Tab to New Window instead, which worked.
Xto carry files. It lifts the files and the name rides beside the pointer, but no click landed them in five tries with USB mouse input. Press esc to cancel. Ordinary dragging worked.- Minimizing a floating Flea with super m . The dock showed no Flea icon, so there was no way back on screen.
- Floating one window with super t or popping it out with super o , on a 4K screen at scale 3. The window hung off the edges of the screen.
- Animated GIFs. Our two test GIFs stayed on the first frame in stills taken about a second apart, though the release notes say they animate.
On hybrid Intel and NVIDIA laptops, Flea issue #376 reports that 0.4.0 wakes the NVIDIA chip at startup, adding about 1.5 seconds and about 12 W. It was still open on November 4, and our N100 has no NVIDIA chip, so we did not see it.
Flea is young, with 23 tagged releases between early September and November 3, so keys and menus may change after this guide. If a key here does nothing on your copy, press ? for the current key sheet.
What each release added since our first video
Our first Flea video covered version 0.3.5-2 on Omarchy 4.0.4. It called out plain-text Markdown, a file picker with no thumbnails, and no bulk rename, and those three gaps have since closed.
This list comes from Flea’s changelog, release notes, and GM’s launch video, so it covers more than we tested. If you are on 0.3.12, you have everything up to that row.
| Version | Date | What it added |
|---|---|---|
| 0.3.6 | Sep 28 | Path bar jump by folder name, eject from the sidebar ( ctrl e ), copies confirmed on the drive before a move removes the original |
| 0.3.7 | Oct 1 | Tight row density, Huge and Largest grid sizes, copied and cut marks, each folder remembers its sort |
| 0.3.8 | Oct 6 | Rendered Markdown with Mermaid, math, and tables; picker grid with thumbnails; drag modifiers; Copy as path, name, or URI; V inverts a selection; paste as links |
| 0.3.10 | Oct 13 | Search as you type, bulk rename, tags, image flasher, encrypted drive unlock, folder merge on paste, run card before a script, per-folder views, paste an image as a file |
| 0.3.11 | Oct 16 | Compare two files; CSV and TSV tables; JSON formatting; GIF animation; font samples; camera RAW previews; drag to Trash; Downloads, Pictures, and Videos open newest first |
| 0.3.12 | Oct 17 | Stock Transparent drawn the way Omarchy draws Nautilus; the transparency switch reaches an open window |
| 0.4.0 | Nov 3 | New window on GPUI; 3D previews; fifty languages, live; contents search with ctrl g ; typo tolerance; folders in place; A agent key; Git status marks; Combine Images and batch Convert; terminal version with 3D previews; column drop in narrow windows; toolbar drag on a floating workspace; corners that follow Hyprland; plugins as separate processes; selectable text in previews; user@host:/path in the path bar; Send with rclone |
The two-pane view arrived after our first video, and the 0.3.10 notes already mention its divider.
Troubleshooting
omarchy pkg add flea installed 0.3.12. Your channel does not carry 0.4.0 yet; see the channel section above. omarchy update brings the new version once your channel has it.
h and l move sideways instead of between folders. You are in the grid view. Press ctrl 1 for the list view, or use backspace to go up a folder.
The right arrow does not step between photos in Quick Look. Use j and k to step between files in the preview.
The usual file dialog still opens after flea --default. Run systemctl --user restart xdg-desktop-portal, then try the dialog again.
“Show in folder” opens nothing after removing Flea. Flea was still the default when the package was removed, and its file manager registration stayed behind. Delete it, and if it still opens nothing, log out and back in:
rm ~/.local/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.FileManager1.serviceWhere to go next
For more Omarchy setup, our guide to finding and installing Omarchy plugins covers the plugin marketplace and how to clean up after a plugin. If you are still picking hardware, the Omarchy 4 hardware guide lists the mini PCs and laptops that run it well.
