Flea 0.4.0 is rebuilt in GPUI, with a TUI, plugins and 50 languages
The file manager built for Omarchy trades its QML front end for a GPU renderer and adds content search, a terminal interface and third-party plugins.
Image: thisisgm/flea README (GitHub)
Flea just got a huge update. Version 0.4.0, published on GitHub on November 3, 2026, moves the file manager to a new GPU renderer built on GPUI. Its author, thisisgm, announced it on X the same day as “FINALLY out”, promising it is “faster and lighter (you will feel it)”.
That is a real change of foundations: when we first covered Flea, it was a QML app with a Quickshell front end. According to the release notes, every view, card, menu, preview and dialog of 0.3.12 was carried over to the new renderer. Machines without a working Vulkan driver fall back to software Vulkan and then OpenGL, and if no renderer can open a window, Flea says so and points you to flea --tui.
That terminal interface is the other headline. It previews office documents and 3D models, searches names and file contents, and gains Print and Convert cards. In the graphical app, Ctrl+G now searches inside the files of the open folder, and name search tolerates typos.
Flea also follows the system language and ships the 50 languages Omarchy offers, with missing strings falling back to English. In his announcement, thisisgm adds live language switching and Markdown diagrams drawn by Obsidian’s Pele. Theme, font and window transparency changes now reach an open window at once, and corners follow Hyprland’s rounding.
The rest of the list is long. Some highlights from the release notes:
- Tabs can be dragged into their own window or onto another one, and files drag between panes and windows
- STL, OBJ, PLY, 3MF, STEP and G-code files preview in the preview column and Quick Look
- “Open agent here” starts Omarchy’s agent in the folder being shown
- Third-party plugins run as separate processes, with a new
PLUGINS.mddescribing the protocol with working examples - Flea checks for and installs updates through the Omarchy Package Repository
The README backs the speed claim with new numbers measured on November 2, 2026 on the 0.4.0 candidate. Against a frozen 0.3.12 package on the same machine, the first window appeared in 348 ms instead of 525 ms, and GUI plus backend memory (PSS) dropped from 88.4 MiB to 58.6 MiB. As before, these are medians from one setup, not a universal ranking. The release thanks 45 contributors by name.
Getting it took a little patience. On November 5, 2026, thisisgm wrote on X that only the Edge channel had the 0.4.0 package while other channels were still on 0.3.12, and shared a sudo pacman -U workaround. A few hours later he said the problem was “fully solved” by Ryan R. Hughes, who calls himself an Omarchy maintainer in his X bio and who “tabbed out of WoW to fix this within minutes”.
According to thisisgm, the workaround is no longer needed. Flea is installed with omarchy pkg add flea, flea --default makes it your default file manager, and updates come with omarchy update. If you installed it from the AUR as flea-bin or flea-git, the README says to run sudo pacman -S flea and answer y when pacman offers to remove the old package.
Source: https://github.com/thisisgm/flea/releases/tag/v0.4.0
