A from-scratch file explorer for Windows 11, written in Rust with the Iced GUI toolkit. The goal is native-Explorer feature parity with better performance and none of the legacy bloat.

Features

Tabbed browsing — multiple folder tabs, each with its own navigation history, view mode, scroll position, column layout, and search state.
Recursive search — fast file search powered by an external ripgrep process, with Name and Contents modes and results that stream in as they are found.
Details view with smart columns — resizable, drag-to-size columns that auto-fit to their content via exact text measurement, with widths remembered per folder.
Icons & thumbnails — a grid view backed by shell-extracted icons and thumbnails, loaded off the UI thread so scrolling stays smooth.
Folder tree — an expandable navigation tree in the left pane.
WSL browsing — a "Linux" group that lists your installed WSL distros and browses their filesystems over \\wsl.localhost\<distro>.
Standard navigation — This PC / drives, known folders, back / forward / up, an editable address bar, and live refresh on disk changes.
Built-in file operations — copy, move, rename, delete-to-Recycle-Bin, and open-with-default-app, routed through the Windows shell.

Architecture

Librarian is a Cargo workspace of three crates, layered so that all unsafe Win32/COM code is isolated and the domain logic stays portable and testable:

Crate	Responsibility
`librarian-core`	OS-agnostic domain logic: the model (entries, locations, history), directory enumeration, sorting, and search matching. No `unsafe`, no UI.
`librarian-win`	All Windows shell integration — icons, thumbnails, `IFileOperation`, drives, known folders, WSL discovery — behind safe wrappers. Owns a dedicated COM single-threaded-apartment (STA) worker thread. UI-free (returns plain RGBA/data).
`librarian-app`	The Iced `librarian` binary: the GUI, view model, and message loop.

Recursive search shells out to rg.exe rather than re-implementing traversal; the process is spawned with an argv array (never a shell string) so search queries can't be interpreted as command flags.

Packaging is intentionally out of scope for this repo: it ships a relocatable librarian.exe plus a reusable core library, and is meant to be deployed by a separate installer project.

Building

Requires a recent stable Rust toolchain (edition 2024, Rust ≥ 1.94) on Windows.

# Build everything
cargo build --workspace

# Run the app
cargo run -p librarian-app

# Optimized build
cargo build --release -p librarian-app

The release binary lands at target/release/librarian.exe and is relocatable.

Search setup (ripgrep)

Search requires rg.exe. At runtime Librarian looks for it next to its own executable, then on PATH, then in the common winget/scoop/chocolatey locations. If you don't already have ripgrep, the helper script provisions a per-user copy:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\scripts\install-ripgrep.ps1

See scripts/README.md for options (pinning a version, installing alongside the app, skipping the PATH update).

Development

cargo test --workspace --all-targets   # unit tests
cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets # lints
cargo fmt --all --check                # formatting

CI (.github/workflows/ci.yml) runs the test suite on windows-2025 for every push and pull request to main. Releases are built on demand via release.yml, which produces librarian.exe and a SHA256 checksum.

Notable engineering notes and reviews live in docs/:

debug_log.md — running log of notable bug fixes.
phase2_simplify_review.md — code-quality pass.
crash_class_review_filepilot.md — defensive review against a known file-explorer crash class.

License

Licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0.