Rclone Browser Fork With Fixes And Enhancements

Rclone Browser fork

Rclone Browser is a fairly popular cross-platform GUI for Rclone. Its development was stopped in 2017, but a Rclone Browser fork was created recently to fix some "small not working bits and pieces", like the transfer progress not working, while also adding some enhancements.

Let me tell you a few things about Rclone, in case you haven't heard of it, and then continue with Rclone Browser. Rclone is like rsync, but for cloud storage. The command line tool can synchronize files between your filesystem and cloud storage services like Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Nextcloud, Yandex Disk, Dropbox, Amazon Drive and S3, Mega, pCloud, and others (and having WebDAV, FTP and SFTP support), as well as directly between cloud storage services. It also supports mounting these cloud storage services so you can access your files using desktop applications.

Rclone Browser is a Qt5 GUI for Rclone that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. The tool exposes many of the Rclone features to an easy-to-use interface. Using it, you can browse and transfer file from / to cloud storage services (even encrypted), perform file operations like rename, move, or delete, mount the storage with the click of a button (on Linux and Mac), and even stream videos hosted in the cloud using VLC or mpv.

This tool is meant to be used, as the name suggests, as a file browser, and it's not intended to replace automated sync solutions. It doesn't automatically watch folders for changes and automatically synchronizes them. The sync / upload / download is performed on demand.

Rclone Browser fork remote filelist

Complete Rclone Browser feature list:

  • Allows to browse and modify any rclone remote, including encrypted ones
  • Uses same configuration file as rclone, no extra configuration required
  • Supports custom location and encryption for .rclone.conf configuration file
  • Simultaneously navigate multiple repositories in separate tabs
  • Lists files hierarchically with file name, size and modify date
  • All rclone commands are executed asynchronously, no freezing GUI
  • File hierarchy is lazily cached in memory, for faster traversal of folders
  • Allows uploading, download, create new folders, rename or delete files and folders
  • Allows calculating size of folder, export list of files and copy rclone command to clipboard
  • Can process multiple upload or download jobs in background
  • Drag & drop support for dragging files from local file browser for uploading
  • Streaming media files for playback in player like mpv or similar (e.g. with VLC, use vlc - as the command)
  • Mount and unmount folders on macOS, GNU/Linux and Windows (for Windows requires winfsp and for Mac fuse for macOS)
  • Options to specify default upload/download folders, configurable download/upload settings, and configurable mount settings (with --vfs-cache-mode writes as default).
  • Optionally minimizes to tray, with notifications when upload/download finishes

It's worth noting that Rclone has added its own user interface with the recent 1.49 release, in the form of a web UI, which is great for basic usage, though Rclone Browser has more features, including mounting remotes on macOS and Linux, and streaming files directly from a remote cloud storage service. However, the build-in Rclone web UI is still very new, and should improve in future releases.

This Rclone Browser fork includes compilation errors fixes for latest Qt (which as a result, fixes a few things on its own, like support for dark mode on macOS), fixes for the progress display with recent Rclone versions (you need to enable the Verbose output option when uploading / downloading a file), fixed Config button command, and fixes for missing remotes icons. It also adds some tweaks and enhancements:

  • add ETA and Total Size fields to the progress display
  • new preference to show hidden files and folders
  • add option to set cache mode for mounts
  • support for shared Google Drive files
  • add a Public Link option to the right-click menu

The Rclone Browser fork can be downloaded from its releases tab in case you want to get precompiled binaries (AppImage for Linux, available for i386, x86_64 and armhf / Raspberry Pi). On Arch Linux there's a third-party AUR package that you can use to install the Rclone Browser fork. Or you may compile it from source. Since Rclone Browser is a GUI for Rclone, you'll also need to download and install the latter on your system.