vimpostor / blobdrop

Drag and drop files directly out of the terminal

Blobdrop

Drag and drop your files directly from the terminal.

demo.mp4

Installation

Note: For Arch Linux users there is an AUR package, for Nix users there is a flake available. You can also download an AppImage from the latest release.

Building from source

Make sure you have a C++23 compiler and the latest Qt with the Declarative and Svg modules installed.

cmake -B build
cmake --build build

# install the build/blobdrop binary
cmake --install build

Usage

blobdrop [files-to-drag]

For more options see blobdrop -h or the man page blobdrop(1).

Features

• Drag files to other applications
• Pipe filenames asynchronously into stdin
• Start drag automatically without a GUI
• Hide the parent terminal emulator while dragging
• Automatically quit once all paths have been dragged
• Auto-hide the GUI while dragging
• Show mime icons and thumbnails for media
• Drag all files at once
• Act as a sink and print dropped files to the terminal
• Optionally keep the window on top
• Quickly open files with a single click
• Respect system dark mode
• Shell completions

Frontends

Blobdrop implements multiple frontends to drag the files from:

• From a normal window
• Inside a desktop notification, using the x-kde-urls Notifications extension
• As an immediate drop to a click location, this works on all EWMH-compliant window managers
• As clipboard content, allowing to paste the file URIs to other programs
• As an OSC8 hyper link in the terminal emulator, but currently there exists no terminal emulator that can drag and drop OSC8 links

Alternatives

• dragon - A GTK implementation of the same concept
• clidrag - A CLI-only implementation
• ripdrag - Like dragon with GTK, but rewritten in Rust

Note that none of these alternatives provide a workflow similar to blobdrop's immediate frontend (except clidrag, but it lacks many UX improvements).