A native Rust + GTK4 desktop app for converting files and applying quick file tools. Rebuilt from the observed behavior of the original macOS FanDrop 0.1, with Linux conversion engines and desktop integration. The interface and icon are new; no macOS executable or Tangerine assets are bundled.
Download the Flatpak test release · Installation instructions
After a native installation, run "$HOME/.local/bin/filewheel" from a terminal or open FileWheel in your application launcher. If ~/.local/bin is on your PATH, filewheel also works. Drag files from Dolphin onto the orange floating target at the right edge of the screen, then move onto a segment of the wheel and release. Dropping on the target itself stages the files in the main window. You can also choose Add files, drop directly onto the main wheel, or pass paths on the command line.
FileWheel opens with a 1.8-second logo reveal and warm light rings, followed by a typewriter animation of the header name. Click the intro or press Escape to skip. Desktop settings that disable GTK animations skip both effects. The Ribeye font and its OFL license are bundled in data/fonts and embedded in the binary.
Choose About in the header for the logo, version, Created by Danny Rudd, GitHub profile and project links, and release controls. Check for updates requests the latest stable GitHub release only when clicked (requires curl); Releases opens the download page. Close with ×, Close, or Escape. The version comes from Cargo package metadata.
Choose Appearance to switch between Dark, Light, and Follow system. Pick one of eight accent colors, use the native color picker, or enter a #RRGGBB color. The window, wheel and floating target update immediately, with contrasting text chosen for your accent. Restore defaults returns to dark/orange.
The wheel uses rounded wedge buttons with soft shadows, icons above each label, and a pill in the center. Hovering an available operation highlights its wedge in your chosen accent. Gaps and cut-away corners do not activate operations when clicked or dropped onto. The Appearance window scrolls on smaller screens. Click Test effects to replay the enabled sound and briefly highlight the button; the caption shows which effects are being tested, or prompts you to enable one if both are off. See the rounded buttons and updated Appearance panel.
Buttons and enabled wheel segments have a soft accent glow and a short, quiet hover sound. Turn either effect off under Appearance → Hover feedback. Sound is rate-limited, uses your desktop's event-audio volume, and needs optional libcanberra; the Nix package supplies it. Preferences save automatically to ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-~/.config}/filewheel/appearance.conf. Follow system listens to the desktop settings portal and falls back to the initial GTK theme when that portal is unavailable.
| Light theme with blue accent | Appearance controls |
|---|---|
 |
 |
Use Convert, Tools, or Actions to switch menus. While pointing at a wheel or dragging over it, Shift selects Convert, Ctrl selects Tools, and Alt selects Actions. Arrow keys select a segment, Enter applies it, and Escape hides the floating wheel. The buttons below the main wheel provide keyboard-accessible versions of the same operations.
Outputs are saved beside the originals. Existing names receive a numeric suffix starting at 2. Jobs run in the background, show real errors, and can be cancelled. Quitting during a job cancels the current converter before exiting. Trash asks for confirmation and uses the desktop Trash.
| File type | Conversion formats | Tools |
|---|---|---|
| Images | JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, TIFF, AVIF, BMP; PDF export; SVG input only | Resize to 1280, compress to JPEG, strip metadata, rotate, grayscale |
| Audio | MP3, M4A, WAV, FLAC, OGG (Vorbis), Opus, AIFF, WMA | Strip metadata, normalize, first 30 seconds, mono, compress |
| Video (including GIF) | MP4, MOV, MKV, WebM, AVI, WMV, GIF; MP3 export | Compress, strip metadata, mute, first 10 seconds, save frame |
| DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, JPG, PNG, EPUB, TXT, MD | All pages; JPG/PNG at 300 DPI; ZIP; optional qpdf metadata removal | |
| Documents | DOCX, Markdown, TXT, EPUB; HTML export; Pages, RTF, RTFD and text clippings input | Copy text, copy word count, ZIP |
| Slides | PPT/PPTX → PDF, JPG, PNG; PPT input only | All slides; JPG/PNG at 300 DPI; ZIP, hashing |
| Spreadsheets | XLSX, ODS, CSV, TSV; PDF export; XLS input only | ZIP, hashing |
| Subtitles | SRT, VTT; TXT export without timestamps | ZIP, hashing |
| Archives | ZIP, TAR, GZIP (tar.gz); RAR input only | Repack members without extracting them; ZIP, hashing |
| Other files / folders | ZIP; folders also TAR/GZIP; SHA-256 for files | Archiving, hashing |
Open Formats in the header for the format reference and limitations. The subtitle also shows notes for the selected file family.
Conversion details. Pages export appears disabled with an explanation: Linux's LibreOffice engine can import supported Pages versions but cannot create Pages files (LibreOffice guide). Pages bundles are packaged for import. RTFD imports the bundle's RTF content; attachments are not preserved. Text clippings accept text/plist data or classic resource forks in AppleDouble ._ sidecars; include the sidecar when copying from macOS. EPUB import follows the spine reading order and EPUB export creates a valid EPUB 3 package; both use reflowed text and omit rich layout/images.
PDF DOCX/EPUB/TXT/MD exports extract embedded text without reconstructing the original layout. PDF XLSX places each extracted text line in one spreadsheet row; it does not recover tables or formulas. Scans require OCR before these text exports. PDF PPTX imports page objects through Impress; editability and fidelity depend on the source. JPG/PNG always export all pages at 300 DPI, including all slides for presentation inputs. CSV/TSV exports the first worksheet; other sheets remain in XLSX/ODS outputs. GZIP output is a gzip-compressed TAR archive (.tar.gz), and both standalone gzip files and compressed TAR input are supported. Original archive members are repacked without extraction to user folders.
Actions include Copy path, Reveal, Open, Preview, and Trash. Image and plain-text previews open inside FileWheel; video/audio use GTK's installed media backend. Other document previews use the default desktop application. Mixed selections expose common operations, falling back to ZIP/hashing where appropriate. Image compression makes a JPEG with a white background for transparency. Markdown uses LibreOffice’s Markdown import/export filter. Document layout and supported codecs depend on the installed engines.
KDE Wayland integration. The floating target and wheel use gtk4-layer-shell, which is supported on the tested KDE Wayland session. The tray icon opens the main window; its secondary action toggles the target. Hide keeps FileWheel running in the tray; Quit exits. filewheel --background starts just the floating target. Startup at login is not enabled automatically.
Wayland restricts observing another application's file drags. Bring the drag onto FileWheel's visible target to open the wheel. This build does not globally intercept Shift-drag anywhere on the desktop. On compositors without layer-shell support, the target uses a regular GTK window.
Build and install. See the Linux distribution guide for Arch, Ubuntu/Mint/Pop!_OS, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, openSUSE, Void, Alpine, immutable desktops and other distributions. NixOS/Nix users: use the flake, NixOS and Home Manager guide, including nix run github:danny19862025/FileWheel.
A prebuilt x86_64 Linux Flatpak is available from the GitHub test release. No compilation is required. This is a pre-release, not a Flathub listing.
Install Flatpak for your distribution first, then download
FileWheel-full-test-x86_64.flatpak and
FileWheel-full-test-x86_64.flatpak.sha256 from that release into Downloads.
Verify the download:
cd ~/Downloads
sha256sum -c FileWheel-full-test-x86_64.flatpak.sha256Continue only if it reports OK. Add Flathub for the shared GNOME runtime, then install and launch FileWheel:
flatpak remote-add --user --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
flatpak install --user flathub org.gnome.Platform//51
flatpak install --user ~/Downloads/FileWheel-full-test-x86_64.flatpak
flatpak run --user --branch=full-test io.github.danny19862025.FileWheelThe runtime requires an additional download if it is not already installed. The package has home-folder access to save outputs beside originals. Document-to-PDF, PDF-to-PNG/text and image-to-AVIF conversions have been tested by the maintainer on a desktop and laptop; this does not cover every input file or desktop environment.
Check the release page manually for newer test builds; the app's stable-release checker does not list pre-releases. The Flatpak preparation notes describe upstream packaging background, not a Flathub submission.
Requires current stable Rust, GTK ≥ 4.10 development files, and gtk4-layer-shell, and Pango ≥ 1.56 development files. Image conversion requires ImageMagick 7 (magick). On Arch, runtime/conversion packages are gtk4, gtk4-layer-shell, fontconfig, imagemagick, ffmpeg, libreoffice-fresh (or libreoffice-still), poppler, libarchive, coreutils, and python (standard-library adapters for EPUB, text clippings and gzip input). Optional qpdf enables PDF document metadata removal. Missing engines disable their operations and are shown under Conversion engines. At startup FileWheel also queries ImageMagick's read/write format support and FFmpeg's encoders, disabling image formats and explicit media presets whose required codecs are absent. These checks use bounded engine queries; runtime policies, input decoders, and tools using a container's default codec can still affect conversion. Restart FileWheel after changing engines or codecs.
After installing the dependencies for your distribution, clone the repository and run the installer:
git clone https://github.com/danny19862025/FileWheel.git
cd FileWheel
bash install.sh
"$HOME/.local/bin/filewheel"If you already cloned FileWheel, open a terminal inside that FileWheel folder and run the last two lines. install.sh builds the release binary automatically; a separate cargo build command is not needed.
The installer writes only to ~/.local/bin, ~/.local/share/applications, and ~/.local/share/icons. No file associations are made the default. Core conversion jobs use executable paths and argument arrays without a shell. Job staging uses private temporary folders, reserves output names without replacing existing files, and cleans up failed/cancelled output. Cancellation and timeouts kill the converter's process group, including wrapper children. SHA-256, Copy text, and Word count stage in the system temporary directory, so they work with readable files in non-writable folders. File-producing operations still save beside the original.
Local diagnostics are at ${XDG_STATE_HOME:-~/.local/state}/filewheel/jobs.log. New entries contain only the operation, source/output paths, and outcome. Clipboard contents, document text, and converter diagnostics are excluded. Logs from earlier builds are not rewritten and may contain previously copied text.
PDF metadata removal uses qpdf's remove-info and remove-metadata options. It removes document-level Info/XMP metadata and is not a forensic sanitization tool; modification dates and metadata within page content may remain. That optional operation was unavailable on the development machine because qpdf was not installed.
Verification.
cargo test
python3 tests/formats_test.py
target/release/filewheel --self-test
FILEWHEEL_SCREENSHOT=/tmp/filewheel.png target/release/filewheel --smoke-test
target/release/filewheel --sound-testUnit/import tests check file-family routing, input-only restrictions, missing engines/codecs, subtitle cue text, EPUB packages, macOS clipping resource forks, collision-safe output reservation, cancellation/timeouts with wrapper children, dotted office filenames, clipboard operations on read-only inputs, exclusion of document contents from the written job log, and radial hit-test boundaries/gaps. Run the Rust tests as an unprivileged user so filesystem permission regressions are meaningful. The self-test generates temporary fixtures and exercises the conversion presets and tools, multi-page PDF export, DOCX text round trips with dotted filenames, real clipboard operations in a non-writable folder, failed-conversion cleanup, original preservation, and filenames containing quotes and shell punctuation. The GTK smoke test exercises mode buttons, the actual GTK drop signal handler, asynchronous conversion, result display, and mapping the Wayland target/wheel. It does not synthesize a physical drag from Dolphin or test every media preview plugin.
Appearance regressions check saved preferences, invalid custom colors and text contrast. The GTK smoke also exercises theme/preset/custom-color changes, saved hover toggles, system-mode changes, reset, hover-controller routing and reopening the Appearance window, using an isolated temporary settings file. --sound-test plays one short hover cue through the real desktop audio backend.
Source layout: src/engine.rs handles capabilities and jobs; src/main.rs owns the UI, clipboard and desktop actions; src/wheel.rs draws and hit-tests the radial menu; src/layer.rs contains the small layer-shell FFI adapter; src/smoke.rs contains the real-file verification harness.