Wusel
Nextcloud, woven into your desktop.
Wusel makes your Nextcloud appear as an ordinary folder on your Linux desktop. Nothing is downloaded until you open it, so the folder can be far larger than your disk, and it is ready the moment you log in rather than after a long first sync.
It runs best on Linux, where the mount is a FUSE filesystem — on any desktop, or on a server with none at all — and the parts that make it feel native (the sidebar entry, the per-file emblems, the search) are GNOME and Nautilus. macOS has experimental support too, as a native Finder integration. Platform support says exactly what runs where.
Where do you want to start?
I have never used it |
Twenty minutes, from an empty machine to files you can open. Three versions of the same walkthrough — the steps are the same, what you see at the end is not. Follow one top to bottom and it works. |
I want to do one particular thing |
Short recipes for a task you already have in mind. They assume you know your way around a terminal. |
I need to look something up |
Complete lists, no prose. Every command, every setting, every path. |
I want to understand how it works |
The reasoning behind the design, for anyone deciding whether to rely on it — or thinking about contributing. |
What it is
Wusel is written in Rust and is VFS-first: files are online-only by default and are fetched on access. No released version of the official Nextcloud client offers that on Linux, where it mirrors everything to disk; an opt-in beta mode built on a separate FUSE process is in review (Compared to the official Nextcloud client).
It is also deliberately more than a FUSE mount. FUSE only makes the files appear; on top of it Wusel behaves like a part of the desktop rather than a mounted drive — a Wusel (Nextcloud) entry in the Files sidebar, an emblem on every file saying whether it is online-only, cached or pinned, a right-click Make Available Offline, your Nextcloud in the Activities search, and native notifications when something needs your attention.
That is a stance, not an accident. Wusel prefers what the desktop already provides — the file manager’s sidebar, the shell’s search, the system’s notifications, the OS keyring — over reinventing them in an app window or a tray icon. Fewer moving parts, and an experience that feels native because it is.
A native macOS frontend (File Provider) exists and is experimental; a Windows one (Cloud Filter) is planned. See the roadmap.
Wusel is built by IT Beratung Hermann, who also offer commercial support for it. The source is the whole product and always will be — Licence says where the line runs.