Files and clipboard

Where your Android files appear inside Linux, where Linux files live, and how copy and paste crosses between them.

Your Android files, inside Linux

Grant Device files on the home screen and your device's folders appear directly in your Linux home directory:

~/Documents      ~/Downloads      ~/Pictures
~/Music          ~/Camera         ~/SD card

These are the real folders, not copies. A file saved to ~/Downloads from a Linux application is in your Android Downloads folder the moment it is written, and shows up in your file manager, gallery and any Android app that reads them.

That makes the obvious workflows work without thinking about it. Download something in Chrome on Android and open it in a Linux editor. Export from GIMP straight into your camera roll. Point a build at a directory that syncs with your cloud storage app.

Open Android files in Linux apps

Breadstick Pro.

Breadstick appears in Android's Open with and Edit choices for documents, images and text: Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, OpenDocument files, PDF, RTF, plain text and code, JSON, XML, and photos and other images. Choose Breadstick Linux in any app, such as a file manager or an email attachment, and pick the Linux app to open it in: LibreOffice for a spreadsheet, GIMP for a photo, VS Code for code. Apps that say they open that kind of file are listed first, and All apps shows the rest.

Linux starts if it is not running, in the mode you used last. Where the file opens depends on where it lives:

• In place, when you have granted full file access and the file is in your device's own storage. The Linux app opens the real file through /mnt/android, so saving saves it.
• As a copy otherwise, in /mnt/host/Opened. When the app that sent the file lets it be changed, Save changes back to the original is on, and each time the Linux app saves, the change is written back to where the file came from, for up to a day while Breadstick keeps running. If writing back fails, a notification says so, and your changes are safe in /mnt/host/Opened. When the sending app allows reading only, changes stay in Linux.

Copies in /mnt/host/Opened are cleared after a week, unless they hold changes that were never written back.

A .deb package or an AppImage opened this way goes to the install screen instead, and installing them is free, as it is from Choose a file in Recommended apps. Without Pro, opening a document this way shows the Pro screen, and sharing the file still puts it in Linux for free.

Drag files into Linux

Breadstick Pro.

With Linux beside your Android apps, on Samsung DeX or in another desktop mode that lets you drag between apps, drag a file from an Android app onto a Linux window: a floating window, or the Linux desktop in Desktop mode. It lands where you drop it, as if you had dragged it within Linux: into a folder in the file manager, or into an editor.

The file is copied into /mnt/host/Dropped first, and the Linux app receives the copy. If the spot you dropped on does not take files, Breadstick says so and the copy stays in /mnt/host/Dropped. Breadstick does not clear that folder, so delete copies you no longer need.

This goes one way, from Android into Linux, and takes files, not dragged text. The app you drag from has to allow dragging into other apps; Samsung's My Files does.

Sharing a file to Linux

This part is free. Share a file from any Android app to Breadstick Linux and it is saved to ~/Downloads in Linux, replacing a file there with the same name.

Where Linux itself lives

The Debian system, and anything you install, lives in the app's private storage. Nothing else on the device can read it, and uninstalling Breadstick removes it. Your home directory holds your dotfiles, your projects, and anything you create outside the shared folders above.

If you want a project to survive an uninstall, keep it in one of the shared folders, or take a backup.

The two other mount points

For anything that is not one of the standard folders:

• /mnt/android is your whole internal storage, available once you grant full file access.
• /mnt/sd-card is a memory card, if the device has one.

/mnt/host is Breadstick's own shared folder, which exists whether or not you have granted anything.

Clipboard

Copy and paste crosses between Android and Linux in both directions, with no extra step. Copy a URL in Chrome on Android, paste it into a terminal. Copy an error message out of a Linux editor, paste it into a message.

Clipboard sync can be turned off in Settings if you would rather the two stayed separate.

Opening links and files

A link clicked in a Linux application opens in your Android browser. On a phone or tablet that is usually the better browser, and it is already signed in to everything.

Sign-in pages are the exception. When a Linux application sends you to a website to log in, for example signing in to Claude Desktop, GitHub or a Google account, the page opens in the Linux browser instead. The website has to hand the result back to the application that asked, and only a browser inside Linux can do that: signed in on Android, the application would never find out.

Files, and links meant for a particular Linux application, open in the Linux application that handles them.

To send every web link one way, create ~/.config/breadstick/links containing linux or android, and delete the file to go back to the default:

mkdir -p ~/.config/breadstick && echo linux > ~/.config/breadstick/links

A note on speed

The shared folders go through Android's storage layer, which is slower than the Linux system's own storage. For large builds, git repositories with a lot of small files, or anything that touches thousands of files at once, work in your Linux home directory and copy the result out. The difference is noticeable.