Ejecta

Removable drives in your system tray, done right.
Mount, open and safely eject USB drives — and when something is holding a drive busy, Ejecta tells you what it is and closes it for you.

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“Device is busy.” Which program? 🤔

You click eject and get the dreaded target is busy. Somewhere a terminal is sitting in that folder, a video player still has a file open, or a forgotten python -m http.server is serving from it. Most tray tools stop at the error. Ejecta keeps going:

It names every process holding the drive — name, PID and why (open file, working directory, running from the drive, file mapped in memory) — and offers Close processes and retry: a polite SIGTERM, a SIGKILL only for what's still alive after 3 seconds, then the eject runs again.

 

Prefer to pick? The panel lists them with a Close button each.

Features

• Left click opens a panel with every drive — mounted or not — its size, filesystem, free space and details (device, connection, path, UUID, serial number, encryption). Buttons for Mount, Mount & open, Open, Unmount, Eject and Unlock.
• Right click gives a full menu: per-drive actions, Mount / Unmount / Eject all, Close the processes using it, and the settings.
• Middle click opens the drive in your file manager when there's just one.
• Plug-in notification asks whether to mount (Mount / Mount & open). Optionally, a second one asks whether to open the file manager after mounting. Both can be turned on or off.
• Unmount vs. Eject, explained. Unmount closes the volume and leaves the device connected. Eject unmounts every partition, locks encrypted ones and powers the device off, then tells you it's safe to pull out.
• LUKS encrypted drives unlock inline: type the passphrase in the panel, no extra dialogs.
• Fits your desktop. The panel follows your GTK theme, and picks up KDE/Noctalia colour schemes live when they change.
• Small and direct. One C file and a ~110 KB binary that talks to UDisks2 over D-Bus: no Python, no helper daemons, no polling. It idles at under 20 MB of private memory.
• Speaks your language: English and Spanish so far (add yours).

Requirements

• A StatusNotifierItem tray: Waybar, KDE Plasma, Noctalia, ironbar, the XFCE/LXQt/Budgie trays… On GNOME you need the AppIndicator extension.
• UDisks2, which virtually every desktop distribution runs.
• A notification daemon (mako, dunst, swaync, your desktop's own…).
• GTK 4 and, on Wayland, gtk4-layer-shell so the panel can float next to your bar (niri, Hyprland, sway, river, KDE…). Without it — on GNOME or X11, or when built without it — the panel opens as a normal window.

Install

Build dependencies

Distribution	Command
Arch Linux	sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel gtk4 gtk4-layer-shell gettext
Fedora	sudo dnf install gcc make gtk4-devel gtk4-layer-shell-devel gettext
Debian 13 / Ubuntu 25.04+	sudo apt install gcc make libgtk-4-dev libgtk4-layer-shell-dev gettext pkg-config
openSUSE Tumbleweed	sudo zypper install gcc make gtk4-devel gtk4-layer-shell-devel gettext-tools

Ubuntu 24.04 has no gtk4-layer-shell: drop that package and Ejecta builds anyway, with the panel as a normal window.

Build and install

git clone https://github.com/SimonBlancoE/ejecta.git
cd ejecta
make
sudo make install            # to /usr/local
# or, just for you:
make PREFIX=~/.local install

Start it with your session

Either enable the bundled systemd user service (works with any session that starts graphical-session.target: KDE, GNOME, and niri/Hyprland/sway under UWSM or similar):

systemctl --user enable --now ejecta.service

…or launch it from your compositor's config:

niri:      spawn-at-startup "ejecta"
Hyprland:  exec-once = ejecta
sway:      exec ejecta

Only one instance ever runs. Running ejecta again opens or closes the panel, so you can bind it to a key.

Settings

The toggles live in the right-click menu under Settings. All of them, plus a couple more, are in ~/.config/ejecta/ejecta.ini:

Key	Default	What it does
ask_to_mount	true	Notification when a device is plugged in: Mount / Mount & open
ask_to_open	false	Notification after mounting: Open in the file manager
show_internal	false	Also list partitions on internal disks
always_show_icon	false	Keep the tray icon visible with no drives connected
panel_position	auto	auto places the panel by the tray icon; or top-left, top-right, bottom-left, bottom-right
file_manager	(empty)	Command to open folders with, e.g. nautilus or kitty -e yazi. Empty uses the system default

How “close the processes” works

To find who is using a drive, Ejecta reads /proc: every process's open file descriptors, working directory, executable and memory maps, matched against the drive's mount points. That is what fuser -m does, without shelling out.

• It only sees your own processes: other users' and root's aren't readable without privileges. If none of yours hold the drive, the message says it's probably a system process (an indexer, a backup…) rather than showing an empty list.
• Nothing is killed without you asking. The list is shown first, and closing is always SIGTERM first, SIGKILL only after 3 seconds.
• A terminal whose working directory is on the drive shows up as such: closing it closes that terminal tab.

Translations

Strings live in po/. To add a language:

make pot                                   # refresh po/ejecta.pot
msginit -i po/ejecta.pot -o po/fr.po -l fr
# translate po/fr.po, then:
make && make run                           # run from the tree with translations

Pull requests are welcome.

Why “Ejecta”?

Ejecta is the material a volcano or an impact throws out, which is more or less what this does to your USB drives. It started life as a friendlier replacement for udiskie on a niri + Noctalia desktop.

License

MIT © 2026 Simon Blanco