AI Disclosure: This page was generated by an LLM and may contain inaccuracies. Hand-crafted documentation will be implemented over time on the road to 1.0

Open drives, cloud storage, and Trash

The Locations area in the Navigator panel collects browsable storage roots. It can include your computer’s internal storage, external drives, mounted disk images, network volumes, local cloud-sync folders, and System Trash when the platform supports browsing it in Phials.

Open a drive or mounted volume

Choose a row under Locations to browse it in the active Explorer tab. Middle-click a row to open it in a new Explorer tab.

Right-click a location to:

Open it in Phials.
Open it in Finder on macOS or File Explorer on Windows.
Copy its filesystem path.

On macOS, removable drives and disk images that Phials can eject show an eject control. Finish any file operation that uses the volume, then choose Eject before disconnecting it. On Windows, use File Explorer to eject removable storage; Phials does not currently eject Windows volumes.

Open a cloud-sync folder

Phials discovers existing local cloud-sync roots and adds them to Locations with the provider’s name and icon. On macOS, this includes iCloud Drive and provider folders registered in the system’s CloudStorage area. On Windows, it includes registered sync roots and OneDrive folders. Phials also recognizes common local folders for Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, and Proton Drive when they exist.

Choose a cloud location just like another folder. The cloud provider still controls downloading, uploading, offline availability, and account access. Phials does not connect to provider accounts or show provider sync status. If no supported local sync root is present, no cloud row appears.

Cloud-location discovery is available on macOS and Windows. It does not discover cloud-sync roots on Linux.

Browse System Trash when available

When Phials can expose the current user’s System Trash as a real folder, Trash appears as the final row under Locations. Choose it to browse the trashed items in an Explorer tab.

Dropping files or folders onto Trash uses the operating system’s normal move-to-Trash behavior. To permanently remove everything shown there, right-click Trash, choose Empty Trash, and confirm the destructive action.

The Trash row represents the Trash on the computer’s home volume. It does not combine Trash from external volumes, and Empty Trash does not empty those external-volume locations. If Trash is not shown under Locations, use Finder or File Explorer to browse, restore, or empty System Trash.

To move selected items to Trash from a file listing, see Move files to Trash.