Xion

A file explorer for Linux and Windows, written in Rust with iced. Xion is part of Project Colony: its settings live under Colony/Xion/ in the user configuration directory, and its look comes from the shared Colony theme catalogue.

Status: in development. It builds and its tests pass on Linux and Windows in CI, and cargo deny reports no open advisory.

What it does

• Tabs, back and forward history, and an editable address bar with suggestions.
• A sidebar with drives, favourites, quick access and a folder tree.
• List and grid views with configurable, resizable and sortable columns.
• Copy, move, rename and delete, with progress and undo of the last action. Deleting goes to the trash; Shift+Delete deletes permanently after a confirmation.
• Archives: browse, extract and create .zip, .tar.gz and .7z. Extraction refuses any entry that would land outside the destination folder.
• Search by name over an in-memory index, plus an optional recursive full-text search that respects .gitignore.
• Previews: metadata, images, syntax-highlighted text, a hex view and a diff of two files.
• An embedded terminal panel built on iced_term (alacritty_terminal).
• Locations mounted by gvfs (SMB, SFTP, phones, Google Drive) appear in the sidebar.
• An English and a French interface: Preferences > General > Language picks one, or follows the session's language by default.
• Every Colony theme and accent, two text sizes that multiply, high contrast, a dyslexia-friendly font and reduced motion, all under Preferences, which the Xion button in the top-left corner opens.
• A versioned TOML configuration, reloaded on change, at ~/.config/Colony/Xion/config.toml on Linux.

Installation

Via Colony (recommended)

Search for Xion in Colony and install it. Updates arrive through the launcher, which checks each release's signature before installing it.

Direct binary download

Grab the asset for your platform from the latest release:

Platform	Asset
Linux	xion-linux
Windows	xion-windows.exe

chmod +x xion-linux && ./xion-linux

Build from source

The Rust toolchain is pinned in rust-toolchain.toml; rustup installs it on the first build. Beyond it, the build only needs a C compiler (build-essential on Debian or Ubuntu) for the bundled C code of libgit2, zlib and zstd. The windowing libraries are loaded at run time, so no development package is required.

git clone https://github.com/Project-Colony/Xion.git
cd Xion
cargo build --release
./target/release/xion

On Linux, scripts/install.sh builds a release binary and installs it with its icons and desktop entry under ~/.local, without sudo. scripts/install.sh --uninstall removes exactly what it installed.

Documentation

Technical notes are in docs/ (in French for now): architecture, configuration, search and UI routing.

Code signing policy

Free code signing provided by SignPath.io, certificate by SignPath Foundation.

Windows builds are Authenticode-signed this way once the SignPath Foundation has accepted the project; until then they ship without Authenticode. Every release asset, on every platform, is always signed with the Project-Colony ed25519 release key, and Colony verifies that signature before installing.

Team roles and members:

• Committers and reviewers: MotherSphere
• Approvers: MotherSphere

Privacy policy

Xion itself never contacts the internet: there is no telemetry, no analytics, no account and no update check. It touches the network in one place, your local network, and only when you open it.

• The Network location. Opening or refreshing Network in the sidebar starts a scan, unless the previous one is less than 30 seconds old. Xion browses mDNS (DNS-SD) for SMB, FTP, HTTP and printer services for about three seconds: it sends the standard multicast queries on your local network and lists what answers, marked as unverified, since any machine on the network can announce any name. On Windows it also asks Windows for the SMB shares it can see (WNetEnumResource, then net view). Nothing else is sent during a scan, and Xion asks for and stores no network password. Opening a share found there is ordinary file access through the system.
• gvfs locations. On Linux, locations your desktop has already mounted through gvfs (SMB, SFTP, phones, Google Drive) appear in the sidebar. Xion only lists them; opening one is ordinary file access through gvfs.

What Xion keeps stays on your machine, in config.toml under Colony/Xion/ in your configuration directory: your preferences, the paths of your open tabs and favourites, the labels you put on files, and column widths. Thumbnails and the search index are held in memory only. Xion runs local programs on your behalf: your shell in the terminal panel, ffmpeg, mutool or pdftoppm for video and PDF thumbnails when they are installed, and the system's opener for files you open. On Windows, xion --register adds context-menu entries under HKEY_CURRENT_USER, and xion --unregister removes them.

License

Xion is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later. See LICENSE. Its fonts (JetBrains Mono Nerd Font, OpenDyslexic and Font Awesome 6 Free) come embedded in colony-ui, which ships them with their licence texts.