Filemanagers

Shallot – Qt-based file manager with plugin interface

Last Updated on September 1, 2020

We recently published a comprehensive roundup of the best 15 Qt file managers, finally plumping on Krusader and Dolphin as our recommended tools to manage your file system.

A few of our readers have emailed us requesting we take a spin of Shallot. Never one to disappoint, here’s our take on this file manager. It’s Qt-based with a plugin interface. We compare Shallot with the 15 Qt file managers.

Shallot is billed as a file manager with the maximum degree of flexibility and customizability.

Installation

There’s official packages for Debian/Ubuntu. The latest deb package didn’t install on our Ubuntu based systems complaining that the POCO C++ Libraries were missing. They are a collection of open source C++ class libraries that simplify and accelerate the development of network-centric, portable applications in C++. This was fixed by installing various libraries, and then installing the shallot deb package.

$ sudo dpkg -i libpocofoundation60_1.9.0-5+b1_amd64.deb libpoconet60_1.9.0-4_amd64.deb libpocoxml60_1.9.0-5+b1_amd64.deb libpocojson60_1.9.0-5+b1_amd64.deb libpocoutil60_1.9.0-4_amd64.deb
$ sudo dpkg -i shallot_1.2.4621_amd64.deb

The developer also offers a Flatpak, a software utility that offers a sandbox environment in which users can run applications in isolation from the rest of the system.

The image below shows Shallot being installed with the flatpak. It illustrates the main reason why we don’t advocate this method of software deployment. I’ll leave the explanation as an exercise for the reader. There’s a small prize available for the first reader to identify it.

shallot-flatpak

Instead of the flatpak, we recommend installing shallot by downloading the source tarball, extracting it with tar, and compiling with qmake / make. Here’s the steps to take.

Download the file shallot-1.2.4621.tgz from the project’s website. Then at a shell, type:

$ tar zxvf shallot-1.2.4621.tgz
$ cd shallot-1.2.4621
$ qmake
$ make -j4
$ sudo make install

Regarding the make command, the -j flag tells make that it’s instructed to spawn the provided amount of ‘threads’. Ideally each thread is executed on its own core/CPU, so your multi-core/CPU machine is used to its maximum.

There’s also binaries for Windows if you haven’t yet moved over from the dark side.

Next page: Page 2 – Features

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – Features
Page 3 – Usability
Page 4 – Searching
Page 5 – Extensibility
Page 6 – Protocols
Page 7 – Summary

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Cameron Clyne
Cameron Clyne
4 years ago

Re why you don’t like flatpak – I notice the screenshot indicates it’s pulling in an enormous chunk of KDE.