Flea is a fast file manager built for Omarchy, and Chris Hallas wants it as the default
Flea pairs a Quickshell interface with a Rust backend, follows your Omarchy theme and installs in one line from the Omarchy Package Repository. One Omarchy volunteer already sees it as the future default.
Image: thisisgm/flea (GitHub)
Omarchy’s file manager race just got a serious contender. Flea, by GitHub user thisisgm, bills itself as “the fastest GUI file manager on Omarchy”, and it is getting loud support from the community: on October 28, 2026, Chris Hallas, who calls himself a volunteer at Omarchy in his X bio, wrote on X that he “fully endorse[s] Flea as the future default file manager for Omarchy.”
Hallas, who recently unveiled ODK, called Flea “a labor of love” and urged people to try it “right now.” That is his own opinion, not an official plan: nothing in Omarchy has made Flea the default.
The project is already hard to ignore. The repository, created on September 2, 2026, has 930 stars and 103 forks. It is written in QML with a Quickshell front end and a Rust backend, released under the MIT license, and the latest release is v0.3.12, published on October 17, 2026.
According to the README, Flea packs a lot in:
- Four views (list, columns, grid and two panes), with tabs and natural sorting
- Quick Look on
Spacefor images, PDFs, text, media, archives and 3D model thumbnails - Network shares over SMB, SFTP, FTPS, WebDAV, NFS, Dropbox and Taildrop
- Writing ISO or IMG files to a USB drive, with every byte verified
- Seven tags in your theme’s colours, plus Default, Vim, Mac or Windows key presets
It also fits right into the desktop. Flea follows Omarchy’s themes and window transparency, adds a “shelf” to the Omarchy bar for files you want to drag into other apps, and can act as the default file manager, the Open/Save file dialog and the app behind Super+Shift+F.
Speed is the headline claim. The README publishes benchmarks run on October 12, 2026 with the 0.3.10 source tree, cold caches and three runs per app. On a btrfs folder with 100,000 entries, Flea settled in 1.00 s, against 5.07 s for Dolphin, 6.59 s for Nautilus and 1.84 s for Strata. The author is careful to add that “results describe this machine and workload”, so treat them as one setup, not a universal ranking.
Flea is available only from the Omarchy Package Repository, where it was updated to 0.3.12 in a pull request merged on October 17, 2026. To install it and make it your default, run omarchy pkg add flea && flea --default. Just want to try it? Run only omarchy pkg add flea, and flea --default off undoes the switch.
Choosing a default file manager could also become easier in Omarchy itself. Two open pull requests, #10542 and #16741, would add a File Manager entry under Setup > Defaults with Flea among the choices. Neither has been merged yet.
Source: https://github.com/thisisgm/flea
