FilePathX

A fast, keyboard-friendly Windows file manager written in pure C with OpenGL 3.3 rendering. Inspired by File Pilot.

Features

Browsing

• Tabbed browsing with drag-to-reorder; Ctrl+T opens a new tab pointing to the current folder (not "This PC"), so you can branch off your current location instantly
• Tab and bookmark persistence — your open tabs, active tab and bookmarks are restored on the next launch
• Split view — two independent panels side by side (Ctrl+\), each with its own tabs, view mode, selection and scroll position. Drag-and-drop works across panels
• View modes per folder: Details, Small Icons, Large Icons — the choice is remembered per directory via an LRU cache (capped at 200 entries)
• Per-folder sort memory — sort column and direction are remembered per directory (LRU, capped at 200)
• Time grouping in the Downloads folder — entries are bucketed into Today, Yesterday, This Week, Last Week, This Month, Last Month, Older headers so recent downloads are always at the top
• Async thumbnails for images and videos rendered on a worker thread with an LRU cache (≈ 13 MB cap), so directory listing stays responsive
• Inline path editor — click the breadcrumb to type a path; supports tab-completion-style navigation
• Type-to-jump — start typing letters in a directory to jump to the matching file or folder

Editing

• Multi-select with Shift+click (range) and Ctrl+click (toggle)
• Inline rename with F2; works on a single file or as a batch rename across multiple selections
• Create files & folders from the keyboard:
  • Ctrl+N — new empty file
  • Ctrl+Shift+N — new folder
• Drag-and-drop between panels, between tabs, and to/from external apps (Explorer, browsers, etc.) — the cursor switches to a grab hand while dragging
• Move to Recycle Bin (Delete) or permanent delete (Shift+Delete) via SHFileOperationW
• Same source / destination is detected — duplicate names are auto-suffixed with (2), (3), …

Integration

• Shell context menu — right-click invokes the real Windows context menu via IContextMenu, including Open with, Send to, Properties, etc. (Convert to / Rotate / Scan With are filtered out as noise)
• Open terminal in the current folder — Ctrl+D launches a terminal rooted at the focused tab's path, Ctrl+Shift+D adds a tab to the terminal window you already have open. Which shell it starts is picked in Settings → General → Terminal (see Terminal), so it no longer depends on Windows Terminal's own default profile
• Recycle Bin entry in the sidebar opens the system Recycle Bin
• Bookmarks sidebar — right-click Remove from bookmarks; bookmarks are saved to %APPDATA%\filepathx\bookmarks.txt
• File-system watcher — directory contents auto-refresh when files are added/removed/renamed externally
• Auto-update — checks GitHub Releases in the background (at most once per 24 h); when a newer version exists a dot appears on the Settings button and Settings → General → Updates offers one-click Install and restart

Rendering & platform

• Full Unicode / UTF-8 throughout — Cyrillic, Arabic, CJK, emoji (👋 🎉 🚀) all render correctly. UTF-8 is the internal encoding; wide Win32 APIs are used at every system boundary (FindFirstFileW, MoveFileW, SHFileOperationW, clipboard CF_HDROP wide format, ...)
• Dynamic glyph atlas — glyphs are uploaded on demand to a 1024×1024 atlas that grows as new code points appear, with a hash table for O(1) lookup
• Per-Monitor V2 DPI awareness via embedded manifest — sharp text and correct hit-testing on mixed-DPI multi-monitor setups
• Dark mode title bar through DWM (DWMWA_USE_IMMERSIVE_DARK_MODE)
• Custom OpenGL 3.3 renderer — no GDI text on the hot path; MDL2 icon atlas; all UI is drawn in immediate mode

Build

Requires the Microsoft C/C++ build tools (cl.exe) or GCC via w64devkit.

MSVC

From a Visual Studio Developer Command Prompt:

build.bat

Output: build\FilePathX.exe.

GCC (w64devkit)

export PATH="/path/to/w64devkit/bin:$PATH"
windres -I src src/resource.rc -O coff -o build/resource.o
gcc -O2 -Wall -o build/FilePathX.exe \
    src/main.c src/render.c src/ui.c src/update.c -Isrc build/resource.o \
    -lopengl32 -lgdi32 -luser32 -lshell32 -lshlwapi \
    -ldwmapi -lole32 -luuid -luxtheme -lcomctl32 -lpropsys -lwinhttp -mwindows

Packaged build (portable zip + installer)

make-installer.bat

Bumps nothing by itself — set APP_VERSION in src/version.h first — then builds the stripped release exe, the portable build\FilePathX-win64.zip (the asset the auto-updater downloads) and the NSIS installer build\FilePathX-<version>-setup.exe. Requires NSIS 3.x on PATH or in %ProgramFiles(x86)%\NSIS. The installer is per-user (%LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\FilePathX, no UAC) and keeps %APPDATA%\filepathx (settings, tabs, themes) when uninstalled.

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
Ctrl+T	New tab in current folder
Ctrl+W	Close tab
Ctrl+Tab / Ctrl+Shift+Tab	Next / previous tab
Ctrl+\	Toggle split view
Ctrl+L	Edit path
Ctrl+D	Open terminal in current folder (shell configurable — see Terminal)
Ctrl+Shift+D	New tab in the existing terminal window
Ctrl+N	New empty file
Ctrl+Shift+N	New folder
F2	Rename (works on multi-selection → batch rename)
Backspace	Up one folder
Enter	Open selected
Delete	Move to Recycle Bin
Shift+Delete	Delete permanently
Ctrl+A	Select all
Type letters	Jump to file by prefix

Persistence

State is saved under %APPDATA%\filepathx\:

• bookmarks.txt — one path per line
• tabs.txt — active index + one path per line
• sort.txt — per-folder sort preference (LRU, capped at 200)
• view.txt — per-folder view mode (LRU)
• settings.ini — theme-independent preferences (font size, row density, terminal)

Terminal

Ctrl+D shells out through wt.exe, so without a preference the shell you get is whatever profile Windows Terminal has set as its default — which is why the same build can open Command Prompt on one machine and PowerShell on another. Settings → General → Terminal pins it:

Chip	Launches
Default	Windows Terminal's own default profile (previous behaviour)
Command Prompt	cmd.exe
PowerShell	powershell.exe (Windows PowerShell 5)
PowerShell 7	pwsh.exe

The choice is stored as terminal = 0..3 in %APPDATA%\filepathx\settings.ini and applies immediately. If wt.exe is missing, the selected shell is launched directly in the folder.

For any other terminal emulator, set terminal_cmd (and optionally terminal_args, where {dir} is replaced with the folder) in the same file. When terminal_cmd is set it overrides the chips, which the Settings panel shows as Custom: …:

terminal = 1
; terminal_cmd  = wezterm.exe
; terminal_args = start --cwd "{dir}"

Architecture

• src/main.c — application core: Win32 message loop, COM integration, scanning, panels/tabs, all UI building
• src/render.c / render.h — OpenGL 3.3 renderer, font atlas, MDL2 icon atlas, immediate-mode quad/text/icon API
• src/ui.c / ui.h — immediate-mode widgets (tab, button, scrollbar, section header)
• src/app.manifest — DPI PerMonitorV2 + Windows 10/11 compatibility + long path support
• src/resource.rc — embeds manifest and application icon

Roughly 4 000 lines of C, no external runtime dependencies beyond stock Windows libraries.

License

MIT