Your Nextcloud files as a folder — on any Linux desktop

Download the file for your distribution and architecture from the latest release. Then, for an RPM-based distribution:

For a Debian-based one:

On Arch, build the recipe from the repository — cd wusel/packaging/aur && makepkg -si.

That is the only step where your distribution matters. Everything below is the same everywhere.

Nothing GNOME is pulled in. The Nautilus extension and the Shell search provider are suggested, not required, so your package manager leaves them out — you get the mount and about five packages.

It prints a URL. Open it, confirm in the browser, and come back to the terminal. You should see:

Your real account password is never sent to Wusel. What it received is a separate app password that you can revoke at any time in Nextcloud under Settings → Security.

The password goes into your desktop’s keyring. KWallet works, so does KeePassXC, and so does anything else that speaks the freedesktop Secret Service — Wusel talks to the protocol, not to a particular desktop. If nothing usable is running, it falls back to a 0600 file and says so; nothing breaks either way.

Nothing is mounted yet.

One line, two things: --now mounts your cloud at ~/Wusel immediately, and enable makes it come back at every login from now on. There is no terminal to keep open.

Check that it started:

You are looking for active (running).

Your whole Nextcloud tree is there. Note what did not happen: nothing was downloaded. The listing came from the server’s metadata, and the files are online-only.

Open ~/Wusel in your file manager — Dolphin, Thunar, Nemo, whichever. It is an ordinary folder and behaves like one: browse it, open files, drag things in.

Now read one from the terminal:

The content was served straight from the server as you read it, and the whole file has been pulled into a local cache in the background — so opening it again costs nothing.

Your file manager does not draw an emblem for that, but the state is not hidden from you. Ask for it directly:

It answers cached. Before you read the file it would have said online-only. File states lists all five values — this attribute is the same thing GNOME’s emblems are drawn from, and it is what a Dolphin or Thunar plugin would read.

Check your Nextcloud in a browser: the line is there. The folder is read-write — create, edit, rename, delete, mkdir, all of it goes to the server.

A read-only share rejects writes with a permission error, as it should. And if somebody else edited the same file while you did, your version is saved beside theirs as Some (conflicted copy …).txt rather than either one being lost.

Editor and office scratch files — vim swap files, LibreOffice lock files, *.tmp — are kept purely local and never appear in your cloud.

Caching is automatic, but temporary — the cache evicts. To make a file stay:

That file is now downloaded and exempt from eviction: readable with the network off. wusel pin Documents does the same for a whole folder, recursively, and wusel unpin releases it. wusel pins lists what you have pinned.

On GNOME this is a right-click action. Here it is the command, and the command is the same thing the menu calls.

GNOME users get emblems that change as files move between states. The equivalent that works everywhere is:

It names the uploads still owed to the server, the files coming down, and the rest of the work in flight, redrawing once a second. Change a file in Nextcloud’s web interface — or from your phone — and watch it react.

If your server has the notify_push app, remote changes arrive within moments; without it, Wusel catches up within half a minute or so. Either way ls ~/Wusel shows the new state immediately.

Opening a file caches it, so a file indexer walking the mount would download everything it touches. Wusel defends against this by default — the mount root serves .trackerignore and .nomedia markers, which GNOME Tracker honours.

KDE’s Baloo ignores those markers, so it needs telling separately. In System Settings → Search → File Search, add ~/Wusel to the excluded folders.

Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE and Sway ship no file indexer by default, so there is nothing to do there. If you installed one, exclude ~/Wusel in its own settings.

You now have a Nextcloud folder that is always there, costs no disk until you use it, and updates itself. Nothing needs starting; the service comes back at every login.

Notifications do work here, by the way — they are freedesktop, not GNOME. If an upload fails for good or the connection drops, your desktop tells you. Confirm it end to end:

The sidebar entry, the per-file emblems and the desktop search are the pieces that are GNOME-only today.

All three are on the roadmap. None of them affects whether your files work.

~/Wusel goes empty; your files live only in the cloud again. Removing Wusel altogether is Uninstall.