MTT File Manager

Native Windows file manager built in Rust with a modern UI, archive browsing, advanced media preview, and Windows integration.

Key Features

Interface & Navigation

Dark / Light theme — Toggle between dark and light mode in Settings > Appearance; persisted in SQLite, applied to all windows including image, PDF, and text viewers with native title bar support via DWM
Dual panel (split view) — Side-by-side file browsing with independent left and right panels; toggle via the toolbar button. Each panel maintains its own navigation history, sort order, view mode, and selection. File copy/move operations default to the opposite panel as the destination
Tabbed navigation — Multiple tabs with independent history
Grid, Details, Column List, and Miller's Columns views — Switch between thumbnail, detailed table, horizontally scrolling list, and Finder-style hierarchical layouts. Miller's Columns keeps the folder hierarchy visible in side-by-side columns and supports keyboard navigation, multi-selection, rectangle selection, inline renaming, context menus, and drag-and-drop
Per-folder view locks — Preserve the view mode, sorting, and folder position for one folder or for that folder and all of its subfolders; inherited locks identify their source folder
Smart address bar — Direct path input with breadcrumbs
Sidebar — Quick access to drives, libraries, Cloud Drives, and Recycle Bin
Cloud Drives — Detects Windows Cloud Files sync roots registered with Explorer and shows them in a dedicated sidebar section; tested with OneDrive, Proton Drive and Google Drive
Quick Access — Pin folders via right-click or drag-and-drop; reorder via drag; persistent storage
Tags — Assign persistent color tags to files and folders, browse dedicated Tag views from the sidebar, resize the Tags area, and manage custom tags from Settings
Archive navigation — Open supported compressed files like folders and browse their contents directly (.zip, .7z, .rar, .tar, .tar.gz, .tgz, .tar.bz2, .tbz2, .tar.xz, .txz, .tar.zst, .tzst, .gz, .gzip)

Media Preview

Integrated preview — View files without leaving the app
Dedicated image viewer — Separate process with a bounded sliding-window GPU texture cache, hidden-first startup, and multi-threaded decoding
Text viewer — Separate process for plain text, code, logs, and markup files using the same lightweight viewer runtime as the image/PDF viewers
Video player — Standalone mpv-based player with D3D11 GPU pipeline; Up/Down adjusts volume in 5% steps and the mouse wheel seeks backward or forward by five seconds
Audio playback & metadata — Audio-only files open in the standalone mpv player with real-time waveform visualization; the preview panel extracts codec, bitrate, channels, sample rate, and music tags
PDF viewer — Native pdfium-based viewer with asynchronous document loading, prioritized progressive rendering, virtualized pages and thumbnails, bounded texture caching, and keyboard navigation in the thumbnail sidebar
Smart thumbnails — Multi-stage generation: image crate → WIC → Shell API → Media Foundation
Animated GIF playback — Animated preview on details panel

Global Search

Instant search — Query an in-memory index supporting millions of files
Hybrid volume indexing — NTFS/ReFS via USN Journal; non-USN volumes via full-tree scan
Background service — Dedicated Windows Service for continuous indexing
Spotlight-style overlay — Activated by Ctrl+Shift+F
Paginated results — Offset/limit pagination with incremental loading
Tag filters — Narrow global search results to any tagged item or to specific tags
File interactions — Select multiple results, use range selection, copy or cut files, rename inline, open the Windows context menu, and drag results to folders or other applications
Responsive tagged search — Tagged results are resolved asynchronously and stale requests are cancelled when the query or filters change

Disclaimer: The Global Search feature reads the NTFS/ReFS USN Journal and MFT to build its index. Because accessing these system structures requires elevated privileges, the installer registers a dedicated Windows Service that runs with administrative rights. This is the only component of MTT File Manager that requires elevated installation privileges.

File Operations

Core operations — Copy, cut, paste, rename, delete
Batch rename — Select 2+ files and press F2 to open the batch rename modal; configure a shared base name, number position (suffix/prefix), separator style (parentheses, underscore, dash, space, or none), and start/step/padding; drag-to-reorder; live preview table with per-row conflict detection
Native context menu — Full Windows Shell context menu integration, including the native New submenu when right-clicking an empty folder area
External drag-and-drop — Drag files from MTT File Manager to Windows Explorer and other compatible Windows applications
Tag assignment — Add, remove, or switch file/folder tags from the context menu; tags are preserved on supported renames/moves and cleared when files are deleted
Recycle Bin — Browse, restore, and permanently delete
Cloud Files support — Sync status badges for cloud-only, locally available, syncing, and pinned files; supports Windows Cloud Files actions such as "Always keep on this device" and "Free up space"
ISO mounting — Mount ISO files as virtual drives, detect images mounted before the app starts, and eject them from the sidebar

Automatic File Organizer

Persistent rules — Automatically move files from a source folder to a destination based on file extensions
Extension presets — Quickly configure rules for documents, images, videos, audio, archives, and executables, or enter custom extensions
Safe folder monitoring — Existing and newly created matching files are processed only after remaining stable for two seconds; destination conflicts are skipped and existing files are never overwritten
Protected moves and rule validation — Cyclic rules are rejected, source files are checked before moving, and cross-drive copies are verified before their sources are removed
Preview and notifications — Preview how many files match a rule before using it and receive batched details about completed moves, conflicts, and failures

Performance & Cache

Multi-level cache — Memory, disk (SQLite), and GPU textures
Tag view cache — Persistent metadata cache and paged loading make large Tag views appear quickly without preloading thumbnails or increasing GPU texture cache limits
Async workers — Background processing keeps UI responsive
UI virtualization — Efficient rendering of large directories
Per-folder monitoring — Default notify crate watcher with opt-in drive-wide ReadDirectoryChangesW

Graphics Backend

The app supports three rendering backend choices, selectable in Settings > General > GPU Backend (requires app restart):

Auto — Vulkan (Default)

Default backend for the main window on Windows
Best observed scrolling and thumbnail-upload performance in large media folders
Uses Vulkan through wgpu with aggressive thumbnail memory cleanup tuned for this backend
Auto mode uses Vulkan only. If Vulkan is unavailable on the machine, select the Glow + OpenGL fallback and restart the app

Glow — OpenGL (Fallback)

Recommended fallback when Vulkan is unavailable or unstable on the machine
Uses eframe's Glow renderer directly instead of wgpu's OpenGL backend
OpenGL texture uploads can be synchronous on the CPU thread, so the app applies more conservative thumbnail and folder-preview upload limits on this backend

Wgpu — DirectX 12 (Experimental)

Available for compatibility testing from Settings > General > GPU Backend
Known limitation DX12: because wgpu creates the swapchain with FLIP_DISCARD, a brief black frame may flash during the minimize animation on Windows. This is a documented behavior of the wgpu DX12 backend and does not affect functionality.
DirectX 12 is the only backend currently treated as experimental compared with the Vulkan default and Glow + OpenGL fallback

Prerequisites

Windows 10 or newer, 64-bit — The installer targets x64-compatible Windows systems.
Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable 2015-2022 (x64) — Required by the native runtime dependencies. The official Microsoft installer is available at: https://aka.ms/vs/17/release/vc_redist.x64.exe
Administrator permission during installation — Required to install and start the Global Search Windows Service (mtt-search-service.exe).
Video codecs for extended thumbnail support — Optional, but recommended for formats not supported by Windows out of the box. See Video Thumbnail Codecs.

The main file manager does not need to run as administrator for normal file browsing and file operations. Elevated permission is needed for the search service because Global Search indexes NTFS/ReFS volumes using low-level Windows filesystem data such as the USN Journal and MFT. Access to those structures is restricted by Windows, so the installer registers a dedicated Windows Service with the required privileges instead of requiring the whole application to run elevated.

Usage

File Organizer

Create a rule — Open Settings > Organizer, choose source and destination folders, then select an extension preset or enter a comma-separated list of extensions.
Preview matches — Use Preview on an enabled rule to check how many files currently match it.
Enable or disable rules — Enabled rules scan existing matching files and keep monitoring the source folder for new files. Disabling a rule cancels its pending work.
Handle conflicts — If a file with the same name already exists in the destination, the source file is left in place and the app reports the conflict.
Prevent rule cycles — Rules that would repeatedly move the same file type between folders are rejected when saved.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Some app-level shortcuts are configurable in Settings > Keyboard Shortcuts. Standard file and folder shortcuts remain fixed.

Shortcut	Action
Ctrl+T	New tab
Ctrl+W	Close tab
Ctrl+Tab	Next tab
Ctrl+Shift+Tab	Previous tab
Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V	Copy / Paste
Ctrl+X	Cut
Delete	Move to Recycle Bin
Shift+Delete	Permanent delete
F2	Rename (single file) / Batch Rename modal (2+ files selected)
F5	Reload folder
Ctrl+Shift+F	Global search
Ctrl+L	Focus address bar
Ctrl+Shift+N	New folder
Ctrl+Mouse Wheel	Adjust thumbnail size
Alt+Enter	Properties
Space	Video Preview / Open file with internal viewer (Images,PDF,Text)

Technologies

Category	Technology	Version	Purpose
Language	Rust	Edition 2021	Performance and safety
GUI	eframe/egui	0.31	Modern immediate-mode GUI (features: `persistence`, `wgpu`, `glow`)
GPU Backend (Default)	wgpu Vulkan via eframe	24.x	Main window uses Vulkan by default for best thumbnail/grid performance
GPU Backend (Fallback)	Glow OpenGL via eframe	via eframe	OpenGL fallback when Vulkan is unavailable; requires app restart
GPU Backend (Experimental)	wgpu DirectX 12 via eframe	24.x	Compatibility backend available from Settings; requires app restart
Windows API	windows-rs	0.61.0	Native Windows integration
Video	libmpv2	5.0.3	High-performance video playback
PDF	pdfium (pdfium-render)	0.8.37	Native PDF rendering (requires pdfium.dll)
Database	SQLite (rusqlite)	0.32	Reliable persistence
Images	image crate	0.25	Image processing
Archives	zip + sevenz-rust + tar + flate2/bzip2/xz2/zstd	2 / 0.6 / 0.4 / 1 / 0.5 / 0.1 / 0.13	Native archive handling for ZIP, 7z, TAR, and compressed TAR variants
RAR	unrar	0.5	Native RAR handling via the upstream UnRAR source
Parallelism	rayon	1.10	Parallel processing
IPC	Named Pipes + bincode	1.3	App ↔ search service communication
Service	windows-service	0.7	Background indexing service
i18n	rust-i18n	3	Multi-language support (en, pt-BR)

Runtime Dependencies

libmpv-2.dll — Required for video playback
pdfium.dll — Required for PDF viewer
Video codecs — Required for video thumbnail extraction (see Video Thumbnail Codecs below)

Diagnostic Mode Privacy Notes

Settings > Diagnostics writes a privacy-filtered diagnostic file intended for technical troubleshooting with data minimization by design.
The diagnostic file is meant to keep only technical information relevant to application behavior.
File names, folder names, full paths, search text, and other sensitive or private user identifiers should not be exposed in this artifact. The log file is in plain text, so you can check it yourself to see all info collected and decied for yourself if you want to share or not.
Nothing is sent automatically outside the application. The diagnostic file stays local unless the user chooses to share it.
The feature auto-disables after 24 hours and keeps only the latest 10 MiB of filtered diagnostic events.
This is a technical privacy measure for minimization and safer troubleshooting. It is not a standalone legal certification of LGPD or any other regulatory compliance.

Video Thumbnail Codecs

The thumbnail pipeline uses 3 Windows APIs for video files: Shell API (Stage 3), IThumbnailCache (Stage 4), and Media Foundation (Stage 5). All three require video codecs to be registered on the system.

What works out of the box (Windows 10/11)

MP4 (H.264/AVC), WMV, AVI — native Windows codecs

What requires installation

Format	Without codecs	With K-Lite Codec Pack
MP4 H.264	✅ Works	✅ Works
MP4 HEVC/H.265	❌ Fails	✅ Works
MKV (any codec)	❌ Fails	✅ Works
WEBM VP9/AV1	❌ Fails	✅ Works
FLV	❌ Fails	✅ Works

Recommended: K-Lite Codec Pack

Download K-Lite Codec Pack (Standard) — includes LAV Filters which register:

Thumbnail handlers for Windows Shell (enables Stages 3 and 4)
Media Foundation decoders (enables Stage 5)
Support for HEVC/H.265, VP9, AV1, MKV, WEBM, FLV, and more

Note: Without the appropriate codecs installed, all video thumbnail stages will fail silently and the file will display a generic icon instead.

Credits

This project includes and builds upon work from the following projects:

ModernH, by Harkesh Bhatia. Our OSC file originated from this project and is used here with small modifications.
RTX HDR / RTX VSR toggle gist, by anthonybaldwin. This gist served as an early development reference while experimenting with RTX HDR / RTX VSR behavior in mpv; the current repository implementation has since been reworked independently.

License

Except where otherwise noted, the original code and documentation authored for this repository are licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See the top-level LICENSE and NOTICE files.

Apache-2.0 was chosen because it fits the current Rust stack well and gives a clear attribution baseline: anyone redistributing the Apache-licensed portions of this project must preserve the copyright notice, the license text, and any applicable NOTICE entries. In practice, this lets the project require retention of legal attribution, but it does not force public branding, UI credits, or endorsement for every downstream project.

This repository also contains or redistributes third-party components that remain under their own licenses and are not relicensed under Apache-2.0. Key examples include:

mpv_ui/portable_config/scripts/modernH.lua and mpv_ui/portable_config/script-opts/osc.conf, derived from ModernH and kept under LGPL-2.1.
mpv_ui/portable_config/scripts/autoload.lua, copied from upstream mpv tooling and governed by upstream mpv licensing.
target\release\libmpv-2.dll, whose redistribution terms depend on the exact binary build shipped.
target\release\pdfium.dll, which carries upstream PDFium licensing and notice obligations independent of the Rust bindings.
mpv_ui/portable_config/fonts/Material-Design-Iconic-Font.ttf, which has its own upstream asset license.
unrar, whose Rust wrapper is permissive but whose embedded UnRAR sources retain the upstream UnRAR license.

The official Windows installer is therefore a multi-license distribution, not an Apache-only artifact. Public redistribution is intended to be allowed when the installer keeps the bundled notices/license texts, the matching source code or source locations remain available, and third-party components are not described as being relicensed under Apache-2.0.

For practical release guidance, see THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md and the third_party_licenses/ bundle. Public installers include that directory, which contains full license texts, attribution notes, source availability notes, and release-sensitive binary provenance.

MTT-File-Manager-RUST