Files

Files is the file manager of the Singularity desktop. It lets you navigate, organize, and act on everything on your machine, and reach files that live elsewhere on your network too.

Three ways to look at a folder

Files gives you three views, and you switch between them from the toolbar or by cycling with Ctrl+Shift+V:

List shows a detailed table with name, size, type, and modified date. You can right-click the column headers to choose which columns appear.
Grid shows icons and thumbnails, with an icon size you can grow and shrink with Ctrl+ and Ctrl-.
Column is the Finder-style view: each folder you open adds a column to the right, so you can see the path you took and move along it quickly.

Finding your way

The path bar at the top is a breadcrumb you can click to jump to any parent folder. Press / to turn it into a text field with path completion, or ~ to start from your home folder. Start typing anywhere in a folder and Files filters it live; press Escape to clear the search.

The sidebar is your map. It holds your common places (Home, Documents, Downloads, Pictures, Music, Videos), along with Recent and Trash. Below that are your bookmarks: drag a folder onto the sidebar to pin it, and right-click to remove it. The Disks entry opens a page showing every mounted drive with a usage bar, and the Network entry is where you reach shared and remote locations.

Working with files

The everyday operations are all here, with keyboard shortcuts for the ones you reach for most: copy, cut, and paste, rename in place with F2, move to Trash with Delete, and make a new folder with Ctrl+Shift+N. Long operations show a progress banner you can cancel, and you can drag files between windows. The Properties dialog shows type, size, location, modified date, and permissions.

Files also handles archives: open one as a folder to browse inside it, extract it here or to a folder you pick, or select files and compress them to a .tar.gz or .zip.

Connecting to a server

From the Network section you can connect to a remote server by address, such as sftp://user@host or ftp://host.

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
`Ctrl+Shift+V`	Cycle list, grid, and column views
`/`	Type a path
`~`	Type a path from home
`Ctrl+H`	Show or hide hidden files
`F2`	Rename
`Delete`	Move to Trash
`Ctrl+Shift+N`	New folder
`Ctrl+C` / `Ctrl+X` / `Ctrl+V`	Copy, cut, paste
`Ctrl+A`	Select all
`Space`	Quick preview
`Ctrl+N`	New window

Files also backs the system file picker, so when another app asks you to open or save something, the dialog you see is Files doing the work.