kio-dropbox

Browse Dropbox as dropbox:/ in Dolphin. No proprietary client, nothing synced to disk.

Download the latest release Source on GitHub

Screenshots

The Dropbox page in System Settings, showing a linked account — Linking an account in System Settings

Dolphin showing the contents of dropbox:/ with Dropbox selected in the Remote section of the sidebar — Browsing Dropbox in Dolphin

What it does

Dropbox in your file manager Browse, open, save, rename and delete at dropbox:/ — in Dolphin, in file dialogs, anywhere KDE opens a URL.
Nothing on disk Folders are listed on demand and files stream as they are opened. No sync daemon, no second copy of your data.
Server-side moves and copies Rearranging files inside Dropbox transfers no data at all — the API does it in place.
Large uploads Anything past one chunk streams through a Dropbox upload session, so a big file never has to fit in memory.
A sidebar entry Dropbox appears under Remote in the Places panel, and one checkbox takes it back out.
Set up where you'd expect System Settings → Network → Settings → Dropbox. Sign-in is OAuth with PKCE; the token lives in KWallet.

Getting started

Arch Linux

Download kio-dropbox-*.pkg.tar.zst from the latest release, then:

sudo pacman -U kio-dropbox-*.pkg.tar.zst

Debian / Ubuntu

Download kio-dropbox_*.deb from the latest release, then:

sudo apt install ./kio-dropbox_*.deb

Fedora / RPM-based distributions

Download kio-dropbox-*.rpm from the latest release, then:

sudo dnf install ./kio-dropbox-*.rpm

From source

git clone https://github.com/timpalpant/kio-dropbox.git
cd kio-dropbox
cmake -S . -B build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr
cmake --build build
sudo cmake --install build

You will need Qt 6 and KDE Frameworks 6 (KIO, KWallet, KCMUtils, KI18n, KCoreAddons, KConfigWidgets, KWidgetsAddons). The full list is in the README.

Log out and back in after installing, so running applications pick up the new protocol and settings page. Then open System Settings → Network → Settings → Dropbox to link an account.

Contributing

Bug reports and patches are welcome — see issues and pull requests. kio-dropbox is free software under the GPL-2.0-or-later.