Your Nextcloud files as a folder — on GNOME

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

For a Debian-based one such as Debian or Ubuntu:

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.

Now log out and log back in. The file-manager extension and the search provider are loaded when a session starts, so the session you are in has not picked them up yet.

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. It is stored in your desktop keyring.

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 and nothing running in the foreground.

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 the Files application. There is now a Wusel (Nextcloud) entry in the sidebar, and every file carries a small cloud emblem — that emblem means "lives on the server, not here".

Now open one. A text file is easiest:

The content is served straight from the server as you read it. Look at the file in Files again: the emblem has changed to a cloud with a check. That means the whole file has been pulled into a local cache in the background, so opening it again costs nothing. It is still evictable — the cache has a size budget.

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:

Its emblem turns into a green check. That file is now downloaded and exempt from eviction — it is readable with the network off. wusel pin Documents does the same for a whole folder, recursively, and wusel unpin releases it.

In Files, the same thing is the right-click action Make Available Offline.

Change a file in Nextcloud’s web interface — or from your phone — and watch the open Files window. If your server has the notify_push app, the change appears within moments, with no refresh. Without it, Wusel catches up within half a minute or so.

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.

Try the Activities overview as well: start typing a filename and your Nextcloud results appear under Wusel (Nextcloud). That search runs on the server, so it finds files you have never downloaded.

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