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Klaster_1
jamiepine
Hey thanks for trying Spacedrive! The bug you're experiencing is known when browsing before adding a "Location". We index Locations ahead of time to generate a cache that makes browsing super fast, Spacedrive is, contrary to some replies here, designed for big data, we cache and virtualize everything.
Next update we'll fix the bug browsing non-locations, as those who open the app tend to try browsing first, before adding as a location it seems. It's alpha software so I hope you give us time to iron it all out!
Rodeoclash
A lot of bitter people in this sub thread. I for one think what you're doing looks amazing and once polished, will use it.
Likewise if you decide to charge for some parts of the tool then you're more than welcome to.
Ignore the haters.
pdntspa
There has to be a better strategy than caching and virtualizing to not tip over with large files. Why not just do whatever is your system's equivalent of a SQL LIMIT query? I can't think of a good reason as to why you need to index everything when the view is limited to maybe 100 files tops.
troupo
Honestly, you can't call yourself a "file explorer" if you fail the basic task of exploring files without an additional step of "adding a location" (wat?)
Also, judging from the GitHub description, it's not a file explorer. It's a slightly extended Dropbox:
--- start quote ---
From cloud services to offline hard drives, Spacedrive combines the storage capacity and processing power of your devices into one personal distributed cloud, that is both secure and intuitive to use.
--- end quote ---
jamiepine
We're early alpha, our product is free and open source
At the end of the day, it is an amazing experience simply just to search and organize files from not just devices, but disconnected drives. Search is lightning fast, the UI is clean and you own all the data, given its local first and peer-to-peer.
Hate it if you must, but we're super passionate about it and are ruthlessly working to reach full stability across all platforms.
PurpleRamen
The explanations tell's me it's loading and interacting with remote file systems, not hosting them on their own. Which makes it different from dropbox&co., and a file explorer.
wetpaws
[dead]
Void_
Seems like most React apps never think of supporting large amounts of data.
Not blaming them - the framework should support it out of the box. You shouldn’t have to understand virtualized lists.
I made a TableView in SwiftUI and I can scroll through thousands of without having the slightest idea how it works under the hood.
trollied
Something has gone wrong somewhere when your file manager UI is written in React.
clnq
If that bothers you, picture this — webasm on Electron.
mrtesthah
[flagged]
SoKamil
I presume that by TableView you mean List { } component. Sadly, there is no component for large horizontal lists in SwiftUI and no, ScrollView with LazyHStack is not an answer due to memory issues.
Void_
There’s a table view now. I made iTunes-like UI for my Spotify songs. Buttery smooth.
throwaway50702
You can use one of the React-Virtualized components without the slightest idea how it works. TableView from SwiftUI is the same thing - a component that implements virtualization on top of the base GUI library for you.
React is not a UI framework, it's a low level reactive library with very limited scope - even the DOM bindings are shipped separately, and it can be used for much more than just GUI, for example VR experiences or cloud infrastructure deployment. Bring your own batteries.
jwells89
The issue with the “bring your own widgets” approach in my experience is that it’s unusual for third party widget packages to have anywhere near the sort of depth and breadth of capabilities compared to the same widgets that come OOTB with native UI toolkits. This means “shopping” for the widget with the best tradeoffs for one’s particular use case and making up for whatever inadequacies it comes with yourself (or just living with the inadequacies, resulting in a crappier app), which is annoying at best.
It’s so much nicer to just be able to trust that an extensive library of stock widgets will be able to do whatever it is that you need, as tends to be the case with AppKit/UIKit.
offices
Windows Explorer does struggle with many files in a directory on a HDD. It doesn't cache the sort order, so opening it with anything other than alphabetical order means waiting 5+ minutes for it to sort them.
eviks
Indeed, with Everything I can sort the whole drive faster than WE can a single large folder
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reacharavindh
I remember looking at it a good long time ago. They didn’t have release packages for me to play with so I told myself that I’d check it out later when they are ready. It looks like they released an alpha version an hour ago - hence this is on HN again.
It is a welcome concept. We have blurred the lines between strictly local files and all the cloud storage options these days. I personally maintain those boundaries and almost never mount cloud storage on my Mac, but my wife(as an academic) deals with Dropbox,iCloud drive, Google Drive and whatever Microsoft calls theirs, because the people she works with shares files through them and collaborate with reviews and such. If a solution like this can mask the vendor specific connection hiccups and quirks and provide a transparent file system that appears local but may be backed by $x cloud storage, that would be a nice boost to her workflow.
The key is the usability of such a tool. If the latencies are so high that it feels slower than Finder, then its chances are slim.
1udfx9cf8azi0
Hacker News is not the best crowd for something like this. Everyone here most likely already has their own optimized workflow for something like this, including me.
This is probably best suited for digital creative types who use Windows and Mac and aren't comfortable with the terminal. Animators, illustrators, video editors, 3d artists, music producers, youtubers, streamers, etc.
It's not clear to me that that second group wants something like this. To be fair, from your marketing I have no idea what your software does and I doubt that group would either. I get that you're trying to communicate this is a "universal" file experience but what does that mean in concrete terms? Users shouldn't have to install your software to understand what it does. I also don't see them caring that this is open source or works on Linux.
At this stage I would totally refresh the marketing and optimize it for that second group. Work with a PR person or marketing expert that understands how to concretely and efficiently communicate the value of what you are building to that second group. I would also take down the source repos and discontinue the Linux version (or keep it private for now, until there is demand) to save your team effort at this super early stage.
Good luck
nidnogg
I've been keeping tabs on this for quite a while. Some feedback:
- Indexing one of my localdev directories has taken a robust 35+ minutes so far, and I will likely not wait until the end of it
- Like others have commented, latency is an issue (macOS M1 14inch base model). I've added a location and even there it sometimes takes 2-4 seconds after opening a folder to see any files
- Am I missing something or are there no tabs yet?
- Extremely lean (too much) in the ways of file sorting and grouping (non-existent), although I wager this will be worked upon during development
- It does feel like I have to do a lot of work to get to sensible indexing (add lots of locations by hand, and so forth)
- I know it's local first, but the way telemetry and login work really does not sit right with me.
Overall I'm almost sure it's not a fit for me, as interacting with it was a bit disappointing, but I can see an audience and there's still ways to go. It looks really good. Best of luck!
lionkor
Why is this written in React? I understand Rust doesn't have any GUI frameworks (like Qt), but is this the way, then? Is it an adversity to learning something new?
You can reasonably write a C++ app or with Qt and write your GUI stuff in QML, and even plug in Lua, Python, or JavaScript as a scripting language. Yes, thats work.
Using a browser to render is just an easier version of using a GPU API like OpenGL to build your GUI. Your OS comes with gui stuff, use it.
Other than that, cool enough, though something like pcmanfm support adding remote locations as well...?
Another question, why Prisma?
hobofan
> I understand Rust doesn't have any GUI frameworks (like Qt), but is this the way, then?
Yes. If you want to build a cross-platform desktop app with Rust, Tauri + React would also be me recommendation right now.
Tauri makes it quite easy to drop down to Rust if you need to (for high-performance operations and everything interfacing with the OS), and it also comes with pre-built packaging for the main different platforms. With React you are able to leverage a great ecosystem that has existing UI components for many things (unlike most native Rust GUI frameworks). It also allows you to reuse you frontend engineers and all their expertise when it comes to web technologies (and working with designers).
lionkor
Thats a great overview, thanks. That actually does answer most of my question.
jenadine
> Rust doesn't have any GUI frameworks (like Qt)
And Slint? And egui? And the Qt bindings crates?
You can say that they aren't as mature as Qt, but they are often good enough compared to something that runs in a browser.
threeseed
> but they are often good enough compared to something that runs in a browser
You can't make an app that looks even half as good as Spacedrive using QT, egui etc.
jenadine
I don't see why not. For example Rust and Qt: https://gyroflow.xyz/
Klonoar
I've years of experience with frontend dev, maintain Rust bindings for AppKit on macOS, and have built things in Slint.
Slint is 100% capable of matching this, lol
lnxg33k1
Try to do something with the qt rust binding please
ShamelessC
It seems unlikely to me that this repository has as many GitHub stars as it does given the early alpha phase and plethora of (known) bugs. Further, you’re seemingly VC funded which is more confusing to me than langchain or pinecone getting funding- and those projects are AI based whereas your project is very well trod territory.
People won’t want this even if it’s free forever. They definitely won’t want it when ads, tracking or a monthly subscription become baked in.
Basically, I have no reason to trust you and lots of reasons to distrust you.
Nothing personal, but if you haven’t considered this perspective you might want to.
moelf
The first screen after "welcome" is a login
why do I want to login a file explorer man this timeline is weird
koolba
> why do I want to login a file explorer man this timeline is weird
From the first line of the link:
>> Spacedrive is an open source cross-platform file manager, powered by a virtual distributed filesystem (VDFS) written in Rust.
You log in because it’s a remote file system. Think Dropbox, not file explorer.
awegio
In their FAQ
> How does it work?
> Using a "Virtual Distributed Filesystem" (VDFS), in other words; a decentralized database that emulates a filesystem. It indexes hardware filesystems to create a master database that is synchronized in realtime between your devices running Spacedrive.
> What makes this different to Dropbox or Google Drive?
> It is not a storage provider, Spacedrive is simply a database that exists on top of existing storage layers, from cloud services like Dropbox, Google Drive and iCloud to physical devices and external drives you already own. It doesn't provide you more storage, rather a supercharged view of your existing storage.
So more like Syncthing? Or rather Windows File Sharing/Samba? I don't really get it
PurpleRamen
That explanations read like it's taking in any kind of file system, local or remote, and combines them into one unified file system. Not really new, but most other file managers focus on the popular storage-services (Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, samba, ftp), and are not open source. If you can easily create plugins for any remote storage, not just the traditional file storages, or even make up your own, then it could become something promising.
mcosta
Yeah, there. It says "file manager"
jamiepine
it was added last minute without any clear explanation for our users, our fault. i will be changed next update. eventually logging in will be a quick way to connect devices, like Tailscale does
jmbwell
A searchable, browseable meta-index of all my disparate cloud and local, mounted and unmounted file repositories is certainly interesting and has been a bit of a holy grail for some time.
Digital Asset Management is nothing new, but it is not a category currently flush with options. Things like Portfolio and <waves hands> Adobe’s tangle of things offer a lot of this, with less emphasis on cloud repositories and more emphasis on workflow and metadata.
These days I would have to consider yet another cloud-dependent service very carefully. Self-hosted/on-premises could be an absolute requirement, considering the potential sensitivity of “all files, including local and offline.” If accounts are required, I would want integration with existing identity management through OIDC or SAML (which, you know, does what this does but for accounts). I would also be looking at continuity facilities… if I build workflows around this and it becomes an essential single pane of glass over all my files, I’ll want to be confident in its availability.
Keep at it. Nobody has solved all this yet. Good luck!
raybb
When you said "Portfolio" were you referring to Adobe Portfolio? https://portfolio.adobe.com/
getcrunk
Project looks amazing! Love the ambition. Have a few notes.
1. Please have one clear toggle for any WAN access. And another one for sending analytics or any sort of usage data be OFF by default. Better yet make them compile time flags too. There was this new terminal called warp(?) that was so sexy but sent data over the net by default and that became a hard no for many.
2. Take some inspiration for Windirstat and everything. Especially everything. Use their search performance as a performance goal!
3. I noticed it in your road map but worth saying again. TABS!
4. Consider moving away from prisma. They really insulate you from your db and a lot of magic. And a part of me maybe unjustifiably is weary that they will do a license switch some day.
CivBase
Can we stop treating "written in Rust" as a feature? It's one of the first things in the README. Whenever I see that I don't think "more stable", I think "someone's pet project".
cfcfcf
I don't see any mention of Rust on their website as a feature. As far as the readme goes, it seems like a relevant detail to include for an open source project?
smcleod
It’s a neat idea with potential - but why the need for a login? That makes it feel like my files are now someone else’s.
wongarsu
I like the idea. The vision is similar to Window's Explorer: seamless integration between offline files and online resources like Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Webdav, Samba, etc; fast, cached thumbnails; an indexer for fast search; encryption, backup etc. Of course in Windows Explorer all those features suck to varying degrees, some so hard they might as well not exist. So seeing an alternative implementation is nice, especially if it tries to take all these concepts even further. Most other file explorers stop far short of that vision.
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Decided to try it out. After the installation, it asks to "create the library", share the analytics and log in - not exactly what I expected compared to other file explorers. Next, I decided to navigate to a random directory on one of my drives. After double clicking, nothing happened. Opening a dir with a context menu action did nothing too. Turns out 15k files in a directory make it effectively non-navigable. Total Commander and Window Explorer have no such issues. Spacedrive still has to iron out the basic file explorer features, it seems.