Notable changes to Ferail, newest first. This tracks what you'd notice as a user; the full detail lives in the git history. Dependency-pin bumps are logged separately in CHANGELOG-DEPS.md.

Unreleased collects work not yet in a tagged build.

• Escape closes dialogs, menus and popups again. The Private Mode shortcut took Escape before anything else in the app and, with Private Mode off, simply dropped it, so no dialog, menu or popup closed with Escape. It now passes the key on. A dialog opened from the menu bar, such as File > New Folder, also closes with Escape now even though closing the menu hands focus back to the file list; the same goes for the command palette.

• The command palette scrolls all the way, in both directions. The wheel used to stop partway down the list, so the last commands were reachable only with the arrow keys. The fix comes with the newer UI toolkit.

• Notifications and dialogs no longer appear in Private Mode. Turning Private Mode on closes the open dialogs and clears notifications, since they could show real file names; any that arrive while it is on wait and appear when you leave it. Notifications also gain a Copy button for their text.

• Building Ferail no longer needs Xcode's Metal compiler. The UI toolkit moved to its crates.io releases (gpui-component 0.7.1 and the matching GPUI snapshot), and its shaders now compile when the app starts.

• The Menus page of Settings shows its icon. The sidebar entry pointed at an icon that does not exist, so it was blank.

• A folder's path tooltip in the path bar comes back after closing its menu with Escape. Closing a path segment's right-click menu with Escape left the full-path tooltip of that segment switched off until the next click.

• The slideshow can skip everything that is not a picture, video or song. A Media only checkbox in the viewer toolbar leaves documents and other files out of the playlist. The choice is remembered for the next viewer.

• The viewer toolbar folds properly in French and German. Its width was estimated from the English labels, so longer translations such as Toujours au premier plan pushed controls off the edge of a narrow window instead of moving them into the … menu.

• The filter's suggestion menu no longer jumps in your way. It used to open as soon as the field changed, even when it was empty or after clicking × to clear it, and it listed every token after any plain word. It now opens only when what you type looks like a filter token (such as si for size:), after a short pause, and it has a close button. Press Down in the field to see the whole list.

• Search subfolders as you type. View > Search Subfolders While Typing makes the filter field search the current folder and everything below it after a short pause, instead of filtering only what is on screen. Enter still does this when the option is off.

• A folder whose files are all hidden or filtered out says so. The list and the icon view said This folder is empty when every file was hidden; it now says how many items are hidden or filtered out and how to show them, and the status bar no longer says Empty folder next to the hidden count.

• The status bar's right side holds still while a folder is being measured. Background tasks starting and stopping made the free-space and hidden-files figures, and their wording, shift back and forth.

• The Windows download instructions explain how to unblock it. Windows marks downloaded files as blocked, and a blocked Ferail cannot start its helper processes. The README now shows the Properties > Unblock step, and the PowerShell equivalent.

• The update window no longer shows the release name twice, once as its heading and again, larger, at the top of the notes. Its buttons are also a little taller, so labels such as Télécharger no longer touch the bottom edge.

• Paste an image straight into a folder. With a screenshot or a copied picture on the clipboard, Paste (Cmd+V) saves it in the folder you are looking at as Pasted Image followed by the date and time, and selects it. Undo removes it again. TIFF and BMP pictures, which many apps put on the clipboard, are saved as PNG.

• Double-clicking an app launches it. Applications, installers and document packages such as Keynote files or the Photos library opened as folders, because on disk they are folders. They now open the way Finder opens them. Show Contents (right-click, or Option+Enter) is how to look inside.

• Double-clicking an archive browses it in Ferail. It used to go to the system's default app, which on a Mac extracts it next to itself without asking. ZIP, 7-Zip, TAR and the other formats Ferail reads now open in the archive browser, in place; opening several at once gives each its own tab. Open With still hands an archive to another app.

• The right-click menu fits what you clicked. Commands now say which kinds of file they apply to: Edit and Edit in TextEdit no longer appear on pictures, videos, archives or programs, and Open as Archive no longer appears on a file that is already a recognised archive.

• List rows are centered vertically. Size, Format, Modified and Description sat at the top of each row while the name beside them was centered on its icon.

• A volume that stops answering no longer freezes Ferail. A network share whose server vanished, a disk pulled mid-read or a crashed FUSE filesystem used to hang the volume list for good, and one left behind in /Volumes after it died kept doing so on every launch. Ferail no longer looks at such leftovers at all, and each mounted volume now gets two seconds to answer; one that does not stays in the sidebar, dimmed and marked not responding, with Eject offered, and the other volumes are listed as usual. Ferail also opens your home folder instead of waiting when the folder it last showed is on such a volume.

• The Volumes list matches Finder on macOS. It showed the hidden - Data half of each system volume, and listed Macintosh HD several times: once for the /Volumes shortcut to the startup disk and once for every empty folder a tool had left behind in /Volumes. Ferail now lists what is actually mounted, skips what Finder hides, and shows each volume once.

• Private Mode shows blurred stand-in thumbnails instead of grey boxes. The mode exists so you can publish a screenshot of a real session, and a grid of identical grey rectangles protected the data by deleting the very thing the screenshot was meant to show. Files now get a soft blur in the list, the icon grid and the preview pane. None of it comes from your files: every pixel is invented from a key created when Private Mode starts, so the same photo captured twice gives two unrelated blurs, and nothing in the picture can be traced back to anything on your disk.

• Ferail speaks Polish. A complete Polish translation now ships inside the app, contributed by Bohun. Pick it in Settings, or let Ferail follow your system language. One rough edge, worth knowing: counts of two, three and four items currently use the same wording as five and above, so a few labels read slightly off until the pack gains its few forms.

• The Windows Recycle Bin shows where each item was deleted from. A second column on every row gives the original folder, the way Explorer does, so you can tell two files with the same name apart before restoring either. Windows records this itself, so it works for everything in the bin whatever put it there. Rows in that view also had no icon at all, from a wrong asset path; they do now.

• The Trash has its own right-click menu, with Put Back. Browsing the Trash used to offer the ordinary file menu, which made no sense there: it proposed renaming, duplicating, compressing and tagging things you had thrown away, and Move to Trash on items already in it. The menu is now short and about deleted items: Open, Put Back, Get Info, Quick Look, Reveal in Finder, Copy Path, Delete Immediately and Empty Trash. Right-click on empty space there offers Select All, Empty Trash and Refresh, and no longer offers to create a folder in your Trash.

• Put Back returns an item to where it came from. Ferail remembers the original location of everything it moves to the Trash, and puts it back there, recreating the folder if it has gone since. It never overwrites: if something else took the name, it says so instead of replacing it. One limit, stated plainly: Ferail can only put back what it trashed. macOS keeps the Finder's own put-back information in a private store that Ferail does not read, so an item trashed by Finder reports that its original location is unknown rather than guessing. (On Windows the Recycle Bin restores through Windows' own command, which needs no such record.)

• You can rearrange the context menus and turn off the entries you never use. Settings ▸ Menus lists every entry the right-click menu shows on a file or folder, and the one on empty space, in the order they appear. Each has a switch, rows can be dragged into whatever order you like, and separators are rows too: drag them where you want a gap, remove the ones you do not, and Add Separator makes a new one. Hiding an entry changes nothing about what Ferail can do: the command keeps its keyboard shortcut and stays in the command palette, and entries still appear only where they apply, so turning one back on does not make it show up on files it cannot act on. Open and Get Info cannot be hidden, and Reset This Menu puts a menu back the way it shipped. A command added in a future version lands next to the entry it was designed to follow rather than at the bottom of your arrangement.

• Closing Ferail now actually ends it, and says why when it does not. Some closes left the process running with no window and no taskbar icon, so the only way to install an update was to kill it by hand. Ferail exits when its last window is gone, and an orphaned sub-window could keep that from ever happening. Quitting now starts a watchdog: if the process is still alive a few seconds later it writes reports/ferail-shutdown-<pid>-<n>.txt naming the windows that outlived the quit, and then exits on its own rather than leaving you to Task Manager. That report is written however you started Ferail, so if this happens to you, attach it: Settings → Diagnostics shows which folder it is in. To keep a stuck process alive for debugging instead, start Ferail from a terminal with FERAIL_NO_SHUTDOWN_EXIT=1 set.

• The Windows Recycle Bin can restore again, and right-click works there at all. Browsing the Recycle Bin showed its contents but the context menu came up empty, so the only thing you could do with it was empty it: Ferail offered the Shell menu only to rows without a file path, and a deleted item has one. Every namespace row now gets the native menu, and a Restore entry sits above it, which puts the selection back where it came from with its original name, dates and permissions. Restoring uses Windows' own restore command, so an item it refuses to put back says so instead of failing silently.

• Double-clicking a checksum file now runs the check. Opening an .sfv, .md5, SHA256SUMS or similar list in a text editor shows a column of hashes, which is rarely what you wanted from it: the verification report opens instead, with the same per-file OK / mismatch / missing outcomes as Verify Checksums…. Open and Open With still open the file as text.

• Entering a folder now previews the item it selected for you. Ferail selects the first row when you open a folder, but nothing asked for that row's preview, so the pane showed the file's details next to an empty thumbnail well until you clicked the row that was already selected. The preview is now requested with the selection.

• Long text previews show a scrollbar. The preview pane's text box stops at a fixed height so a long .nfo, log, or source file cannot bury the file details underneath it, but nothing on screen said the file continued past the last visible line. A vertical scrollbar now sits on the box whenever its content overflows, and stays visible rather than fading out.

• Ferail holds noticeably less memory over a long session. The internal table that gives every file a stable identity stored each path twice; it now shares one copy, which cuts it from 241 to 144 bytes per path (about 90 MB less per million files seen). The table still grows for the life of the process, so a very long session or a recursive scan of a huge tree can still accumulate: that groundwork is tracked, and Ferail now records the size in its issue reports so the growth is visible.

• Double-clicking a selected folder opens it again instead of renaming it. Clicking the name of an already-selected item starts a rename, and that gesture was firing on the first click of a double-click, so the name editor appeared and swallowed the second click. The rename now waits out the double-click interval before it starts, and a double-click cancels it. Click, pause, click still renames, as before.

• The built-in text editor already had find and replace; now you can see them. Cmd+F searches and Cmd+Shift+F replaces (Ctrl+F and Ctrl+H elsewhere), with previous/next, a match counter, a case toggle and Replace All, and they have worked since the editor shipped: nothing in the window pointed at them. The toolbar now has a button for each. Escape also stops closing the whole window when the find panel is open: it closes the panel, and a second Escape closes the window.

• The text editor can reload a file from disk, and tells you where you are. A Reload from Disk button re-reads the file, keeping your place in it, and asks first if you have unsaved edits: useful when something else changed the file while it was open. A new strip along the bottom shows the line and column of the cursor, how many lines the file has, and its encoding and line endings, so a file that came in as CRLF or with a BOM no longer hides that fact. The toolbar's new overflow menu turns line wrapping and line numbers on and off.

• The command palette no longer leaks the file list underneath it. With the shortcuts palette open (Cmd+/), hovering it showed the tooltip of whatever file row sat behind it, and the scroll wheel could go to that row instead of the palette. The palette now blocks the window beneath it, so hover, tooltips and the wheel all belong to the palette while it is up. Scrolling the command list itself with the wheel still stops short of the end; use the arrow keys to reach the last commands until that is fixed.

• The Edit menu is no longer almost empty. Cut, Copy, Paste and Move Items Here were on the keyboard and in the right-click menu but nowhere in the menu bar, which listed only Copy Path.

• Enter in a path or filter field now uses exactly what you typed. Pasting a folder path that contains subfolders and pressing Enter used to append the first suggested subfolder, landing you somewhere you never asked for. Suggestions are now opt-in: Up/Down move the highlight, Tab accepts it, and Enter always goes to (or searches for) what the field actually holds. Applies to the breadcrumb path editor, the Go to Folder prompt, and the filter box.

• Escape now unwinds Ferail's transient UI consistently. It closes filter suggestions before clearing a query, cancels inline name/path edits, exits archive and other docked result surfaces, hides the preview pane, and closes standalone viewers, Get Info, archive, and built-in editor windows. Unsaved text, image, or archive edits still require an explicit Save / Discard / Cancel decision. Editor command-icon tooltips now show their shortcuts, and secondary windows are listed in the app's Window menu and removed from it as soon as they close.

• Compact controls no longer hide their meaning. The filter autocomplete popover can grow independently of the narrow title-bar field, and clicking the field's clear button closes the popover instead of reopening the empty syntax list. Tab close buttons now sit to the left of their labels, keeping the pointer at one fixed position while several tabs are closed in sequence.

• Disk Usage and Flat View refresh selection details immediately. Clicking a deeply nested file in Disk Usage's largest-files list highlights its nearest visible treemap ancestor when the exact leaf is below the drawing depth. Flat View now starts the visible metadata/description pass as soon as enumeration completes instead of waiting for the first scroll.

• Disk Usage filters stay inside Disk Usage. Typing or pressing Enter in the shared filter field now filters the already-scanned treemap instead of replacing it with a generic Search result. The full map remains available with non-matches dimmed, while a new icon toggle redraws the treemap and side list from matching files only. Filtering no longer restarts or waits for a scan to finish: a bounded queue briefly holds incoming facts while a debounced, cancellable background projection reads a stable snapshot, then resumes the same scan. Pending projections show the current map dimmed instead of an empty pane. The side list drops its redundant heading, and the macOS Full Disk Access action is now a compact icon with a tooltip.

• Filter keyboard behavior is predictable again. type: is accepted and autocompleted as a friendly alias for kind:. Token suggestions now remain available after a plain-name term and append the chosen criterion instead of replacing the current search. Escape closes token suggestions before clearing the query, and modal filter help receives Escape instead of the still-focused field behind it. Clearing a Disk Usage filter keeps its scan and treemap alive.

• Nested Disk Usage labels no longer show through their children. The treemap layout now records the exact label strip reserved by each rendered container, and both the live view and HTML export clip the parent name to that strip instead of painting it beneath translucent child tiles.

• A built-in image editor for quick redaction and annotation. Right-click an image and choose Edit Image to black out sensitive parts (rectangle or brush, always opaque) or annotate them (coloured outlines and brush strokes, seven colours, three brush sizes), with step-by-step undo. Cmd+S saves an "edited" copy beside the original (the original is never touched by default) and Cmd+Shift+S overwrites it after an explicit confirmation, keeping its Finder tags and permissions. Edits always render at the image's full resolution, and closing with unsaved edits asks first. Covers PNG, JPEG, BMP, TIFF and WebP; GIF is excluded so animations can't be silently flattened. It is also listed in the File menu, and its location button returns to the exact Ferail source tab and reselects the image.

• A built-in text editor: open, fix, save, close. Right-click a file and choose Edit (or press Cmd+E) to edit it in a small dedicated window, with undo, find, line numbers, and syntax highlighting by file type, instead of round-tripping through TextEdit or Notepad. Cmd+S saves; closing with unsaved changes asks Save / Don't Save / Cancel. Saves keep the file's identity (Finder tags, permissions, creation date) and its exact CRLF/BOM shape, and always write the new text durably to disk before touching the original. Very large or non-text files are politely refused with a one-click hand-off to the system editor; the existing "Edit in TextEdit / Notepad" entry remains. A location button returns to the exact source tab and reselects the file.

• List-view horizontal scrolling is back at the bottom of the table. The updated scrollbar component no longer mistakes the fixed column header for the scrolling viewport, and keyboard column navigation now moves headers and rows in the same frame.

• The command palette now uses gpui-component's native Command control. Search, grouped results, live shortcut hints, arrow-key navigation, Enter, Escape and virtual scrolling share the maintained upstream implementation.

• “Open With” now fills in without rebuilding its context menu. A cold association lookup updates only its retained submenu, preserving the root menu's focus and highlighted item while all shell queries remain off-thread.

• An opt-in performance HUD helps diagnose slow frames and freezes. Run with --performance-hud / FERAIL_PERFORMANCE_HUD=1, or choose “Toggle Performance HUD” in the command palette. It reports GPUI frame timing and process resources without forcing continuous redraws.

• Pathological text previews now have a render-aware safety bound. Large TextView replacements still parse off the UI thread, while heavily wrapped content is capped on whole visual lines instead of growing layout without limit.

• Large background listings can no longer outrun the interface. Ordinary folders and recursive searches now use the same finite producer queue and time-sliced, coalesced UI apply as Flat View; duplicate and folder-size result streams are bounded too. Warm folder-size cache hits are sliced just like cold results, and a continuously refilled duplicate queue yields between foreground batches instead of monopolising a frame. Rapid selection cooperatively cancels both native and text previews, and bursty volume/download progress notifications have finite queues. Results are not capped: producers simply wait when the UI is busy, keeping memory, redraws and cancellation latency predictable. Background tabs still receive their data, but no longer refresh tables or redraw the window for invisible batches; selecting the tab refreshes its accumulated model and warms only its then-visible viewport.

• Deceptive filenames now elide without hiding their warning. Highlighted control characters, unusual whitespace, bidirectional marks and homoglyphs stay on one line in list and icon views. When narrowing the Name column cuts out the dangerous portion, the ellipsis itself carries the warning colour and tooltip instead of letting the name appear harmless.

• Rename now happens directly on the file in list and icon views. F2, context-menu Rename and single-item Bulk Rename replace the visible name with one persistent editor, select a file's stem while preserving its extension, validate as you type, accept with Enter or a click elsewhere, and cancel with Escape. A later plain click on an already-selected name also starts editing, while a real double-click still opens it. Holding F2 can no longer stack rename dialogs. The path bar uses the same quiet inline-editor frame, and editable Windows paths no longer expose the internal \\?\ canonicalization prefix.

• Rectangle selection is restored in list view. Drag from the empty area below a listing to sweep whole rows, or hold Shift/Cmd/Ctrl to add them to the current selection. The gesture uses virtual-row geometry instead of scanning the directory, so it remains responsive with millions of files; icon view uses the same shared selection lifecycle.

• Windows: Fast NTFS now checks its administrator helper before elevating it. Fast NTFS runs a small separate program with administrator rights, and a portable install lives in a folder you can write to, so nothing stopped a different program from taking that helper's place. Ferail now recognises the exact helper it shipped with, and refuses to elevate anything else: a helper that is stale, damaged, half-updated or substituted makes Disk Usage say "Portable fallback: the Fast NTFS helper does not match this build" and scan the ordinary way instead. This is a stopgap, and worth being plain about: it reliably catches a broken or replaced helper, but someone who can already modify files in Ferail's own folder can work around it. Signing the Windows build with a certificate is what closes that properly, and it is still on the list.

• Ferail now has a public privacy policy. It documents local file processing and persistence, the absence of telemetry and automatic report uploads, opt-in update checks (off by default), path-redacted bug bundles (on by default), permissions, minidump caveats, and how to delete local app data. The README, About dialog, and bug-report guide link to it.

• macOS folder icons now appear consistently in list view. Native, path-specific folder artwork is warmed only for the visible rows (plus a small overscan), through the same shared dispatcher as the icon grid. A folder no longer has to be visited before its system icon appears, and very large directories do not trigger a whole-list icon sweep.

• Back, Forward and Parent navigation reveal the correct row after sorting. Navigation now retains the destination as a semantic file identity until streaming and the final sort are complete, then rebinds and centres that row instead of scrolling to whichever item inherited its provisional row number.

• The icons-only sidebar now follows very narrow window resizes. Its strip uses less width in ordinary windows, contracts a little further when the app is squeezed, and recentres the icons instead of preserving the previous oversized left gutter. Every icon-only location, favorite, recent and tree folder now shows its name in a tooltip.

• Several dense controls now resize cleanly. Search and editable paths are real single-line controls with lightweight completion menus, so their text is centred with compact input padding instead of inheriting a document editor's gutter. Escape clears search and cancels path or filename editing; Settings has a wider, user-resizable navigation sidebar and responsive field rows; and Disk Usage keeps its summary and controls on one wrapping header row without repeating the volume free-space meter already shown in the status bar.

• The archive workbench now behaves like a browser, not an extractor. Its actions are compact icons with translated tooltips; Enter and double-click expand an internal folder or open the selected file in the private preview path, while permanent extraction remains an explicit command. “Open as Archive” is offered for any single file and probes content off-thread, so Office documents, JAR/APK packages, extensionless archives and misleading names remain inspectable. Narrow result breadcrumbs are clipped at their splitter instead of painting over the preview pane.

• Fresh folder navigation now selects the first sorted row. Back, Forward, Parent and Refresh retain their stronger semantic-selection rules. Accepting a Windows inline rename no longer lets the same Enter key fall through and try to open the file's previous path.

• Quarantine removal is recursive for directories on macOS and Windows. The cancellable worker removes Gatekeeper provenance or Zone.Identifier throughout the selected tree, includes macOS packages, never follows symlinks or Windows reparse points, and scrubs cached metadata in bounded batches.

• Audio detection is content-capable without mistaking executables for MP3s. Known audio extensions remain the zero-extra-I/O fast path. Renamed or extensionless audio reuses Ferail's bounded magic result, while the MPEG/AAC fallback requires multiple coherent frames instead of accepting one random sync word inside a large binary. Get Info, rich Description lines and embedded cover art now share that policy.

• Bug reports and Fast NTFS diagnostics now have a public recipe. The new guide lists the exact crash/hang text and dump files to attach, privacy-safe capture guidance, useful scale/resource context, and the elevated ferail-ntfs-helper.exe --diagnose <path> procedure and expected aggregate output.

• The Windows installer now includes the Fast NTFS helper. The portable ZIP already staged it, but the Inno file list did not; setup installs now preserve the same narrow elevated-helper boundary as portable builds.

• Windows no longer shows inert Finder-tag controls. Platform shell capabilities now gate Get Info tags, row dots, tag menus and background tag refresh as one feature instead of leaving controls that can never work.

• The path bar and sidebar are easier to discover and personalize. Click the empty breadcrumb tail or its edit icon to type a path. The sidebar cycles through normal, compact and icons-only widths with Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+B, keeps the user's normal width, supports persistent section disclosure and drag-reordering, and can restore its default order. French now uses the shorter “Accès” section title.

• Windows releases now include both portable and installed update paths. CI builds the portable ZIP and Inno Setup package. An installed copy prefers the setup asset and offers “Install and Restart”; a portable copy keeps the ZIP flow, even when another Ferail installation exists on the same machine.

• Private Mode now produces useful screenshots instead of replacing Ferail. The prepared browser and tool layouts remain visible while names, paths, user/provider labels, checksums, sizes, dates and image dimensions receive stable process-session aliases. Personal thumbnails, preview documents and Viewer frames become neutral same-layout placeholders. A process-wide input shield and a reduced native menu freeze the view. The existing title-bar shield is the sole visible indicator: it stays highlighted and toggles the mode back off, with Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+K and Escape as keyboard exits. Window close and Quit remain available. The screenshot CLI keeps privacy enabled by default.

• Windows freeze reports now include an automatic all-thread minidump. When the UI watchdog detects a hang it starts a pristine hidden Ferail broker, which writes a matching ferail-hang-*.dmp beside the text report without relying on locks in the frozen process. The dump carries thread contexts/stacks, module history and handle/thread metadata and can be opened with the exact release PDB bundle; no administrator rights are required for Ferail to dump its own process.

• Disk Usage remains responsive while Portable scans millions of files. The depth-limited treemap now uses incrementally maintained subtree totals instead of revisiting every hidden descendant, broad directories use a linear iterative squarifier instead of recursively copying sibling tails, and the largest-files panel retains only its 50 candidates instead of a temporary row per file. Presentation refreshes back off on very large trees, scan completion derives visual state without rewriting every node, and privacy-safe timing breadcrumbs make any remaining slow layout or Top-N pass identifiable in a hang report.

• Private Mode makes Ferail screenshots safe by default. A new toolbar shield and Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+K command replace every Ferail-owned window with an opaque, non-interactive private presentation. Names use process-session aliases, content and identifying metadata never paint, Viewer transparency is forced off, and only the visible Private badge, the shortcut, Escape, window close, and app quit remain available. The mode is never persisted. The screenshot harness now enables it automatically; the deliberately alarming --unsafe-real-data flag is the only opt-out.

• Large counts are readable everywhere, not just in the footer. The status bar already grouped its figures, "1.104.619 items", but everywhere else a big number arrived as one unbroken run of digits: Disk Usage's header ("1104619 files, 743.4 GB"), the Flat View and duplicate-scan tab subtitles, background-task labels, copy/move/trash notifications, the checksum verifier's OK/mismatch tallies, the image viewer's position counter, the similar-images scan progress, and an archive's member count. Every count Ferail shows is now grouped the same way, in every language.

• Folder contents use the same separator as everything else. The Description column's recursive rollup grouped with commas ("1,204 files · 88 folders") the one place that disagreed with the status bar. It now reads "1.204 files · 88 folders".

• Windows: copied paths no longer start with \\?\. Copy File List, Copy Path and Disk Usage's Copy Paths pasted the extended-length spelling Windows returns when Ferail resolves a folder, \\?\C:\opg\scene\… instead of C:\opg\scene\…: which most shells and apps reject (cd '\\?\C:\opg\scene' is not a valid command). They now copy the ordinary drive-letter form, and network locations paste as \\server\share\….

• The app version now sits next to the Ferail name in the toolbar. Ferail draws its own title bar, so the window caption the OS knows about never appears on screen: a screenshot could not say which build it came from. The version is now shown, muted, beside the wordmark, so a screenshot sent in a bug report carries it.

This is the first all-platform release since 0.6.5. It brings the accumulated Flat View, similar-image search, checksum/sidecar, viewer and Windows reliability work to the platform-specific downloads together.

• Recursive work is faster across the normal filesystem path. macOS keeps names, types, sizes, dates, flags and identities on getattrlistbulk, reuses one native query buffer per worker, and now uses the same bulk records for opaque package totals and Description-column folder rollups. Disk Usage and recursive search cache their iCloud prefix once per scan, while common lowercase file extensions no longer allocate a temporary folded string per row. Local APFS remains bounded to at most eight directory readers; network, removable and unknown media remain deliberately serial.

• macOS and Linux catch up with the shared features released on Windows since 0.6.5. This includes uncapped compact Flat View, similar-image search with adjustable criteria and large-image viewing, SHA-256 generation and clipboard comparison, NFO/ANSI preview, SFV/checksum verification and generation, improved large-selection behavior, and the accumulated viewer, navigation and sidecar polish described in the intervening sections below.

• Fast NTFS remains an explicit Windows preview. Version 0.7.2 carries the 0.7.1 session helper, live phases, bounded parallel parser and OneDrive MFT traversal unchanged. A code audit confirms that direct volume reads really require the isolated elevated helper; broader VHDX qualification and Authenticode signing remain open before promotion beyond preview.

• Cross-platform Disk Usage no longer emits Windows-only warnings on macOS. Fast-engine imports, states and duration formatting are now gated to the platforms/builds that use them, and strict Clippy is clean again.

• Fast NTFS no longer appears frozen and no longer requests elevation for every folder in one Ferail session. The elevated helper stays attached to its authenticated private pipe and serves subsequent scans until Ferail exits; the GUI now reports MFT reading, index construction and subtree traversal progress, then shows the completed scan duration measured after elevation (UAC and credential-entry time are excluded). The raw scan reads bounded 8 MiB windows, parses records in parallel without per-record copies or run-list allocations, and builds parent adjacency in linear time instead of sorting every volume link twice.

• Fast NTFS now handles OneDrive Files On-Demand directories as real containers. Reparse directories with actual MFT children are traversed without resolving their external target, while leaf junctions remain opaque and ancestor tracking still prevents corrupt cycles. Reparse tags carried by NTFS extension records are retained when those records are merged into their base file.

• The Fast NTFS helper has a standalone diagnostic mode. From an elevated terminal, ferail-ntfs-helper.exe --diagnose <path> prints aggregate volume, parser, index, subtree and phase timing data without printing names or the requested path. ferail-ntfs-client-diag <path> [repeat-count] exercises the real UAC/private-pipe path and verifies that one helper serves repeated requests.

• Disk Usage gains an explicit Fast NTFS engine on Windows. Eligible local fixed NTFS volumes can be scanned through a dedicated, one-shot elevated helper that reads the MFT sequentially and streams bounded parent-before- child batches back to the unelevated GUI. Ferail itself remains asInvoker: startup, browsing and Portable scans never request elevation, and cancelling UAC or any helper/protocol failure atomically restarts a clean Portable scan. The private pipe authenticates the elevated process, revalidates the volume and root identity, preserves raw UTF-16 names for actions, never writes the volume, and never persists or logs names, paths or raw records. Fast results account for hard links once, treat reparse directories as leaves, expose apparent/allocated sizes and clearly label a concurrently changing volume as a best-effort snapshot. The engine choice, eligibility and active/fallback state are visible in Disk Usage and the remembered preference lives in Settings. Fast NTFS is new in 0.7.0 and will receive more real-world testing.

• Portable Disk Usage is faster and more accurate on Windows. Directory walks now use bounded FileIdBothDirectoryInfo batches from one handle per folder instead of opening every child. Exact NTFS file identities prevent hard-linked names from inflating totals while Unicode paths, allocation sizes and the Portable fallback contract remain intact.

• Windows packaging now treats the Fast NTFS helper as part of the release identity. The portable ZIP stages the exact sibling helper; the dependency, signing and byte-for-byte gates cover it, and the symbols archive contains its matching PDB and manifest entry.

• Ferail now understands NFO, SFV and checksum sidecars. Content sniffing distinguishes scene/Kodi/MsInfo NFO and common checksum lists; the preview pane decodes CP437 and UTF-16, safely reconstructs ANSI layout and colours with a box-art-friendly terminal font, summarizes Kodi metadata locally, and exposes immediate folder sidecars without persisting their contents. SFV and GNU/BSD checksum manifests open a cancellable virtualized report with explicit mismatch, missing, unsafe-path and changed-during-read outcomes, labelled/aligned expected-checksum columns, compact icon controls, and an action to select an existing problematic target in Ferail. CRC32, MD5, SHA-1 and SHA-2 verification stream through bounded buffers, while SFV/SHA256SUMS generation is atomic, no-clobber and available for a selection or current folder. Checksums are labelled as integrity checks, never proof of authenticity. Refreshing a directory now also discards its bounded in-memory NFO/text/thumbnail and sidecar-discovery results, so edited files are reread without restarting Ferail while unrelated directories remain cached.

• Text files can be sent straight to the platform editor from their context menu. The single-file action opens TextEdit on macOS, Notepad on Windows, and the desktop text association on Linux, without blocking the UI. Long filesystem paths in the Preview/Get Info pane now use Ferail's beginning…middle…end elision and a full-path tooltip instead of overflowing the inspector.

This release publishes Windows x64 portable and symbols archives only. macOS and Linux remain on 0.6.5; Ferail's updater selects the newest release that actually has an asset for the current platform.

• The Windows release dependency gate recognizes propsys.dll as a system component. The approved IPropertyStore integration introduced this built-in Windows dependency; packaging now accepts it while continuing to reject non-system runtime DLLs.

• Linux/WSL locations on Windows are now opt-in. A new Files › Locations setting controls the sidebar section and defaults to off. While off, Ferail does not discover or start WSL distributions; disabling it live also cancels discovery/activation already in progress and rejects late results.

• Development builds now retire GPUI window owners cleanly at exit. The ordered teardown first blurs the real component root and drains its final callbacks, then renders an inert root to discard the old frame's input handlers, element state, listeners, and overlays. This fixes both the InputState leak after preview/filter use and the later PopupMenu leak; packaged builds remain unaffected by the dev-only leak detector.

• Opening a stopped WSL distribution no longer crashes Ferail. The starting-state repaint now uses the Shell update already in progress instead of trying to acquire the same GPUI entity a second time; the final state is still propagated to every window after activation completes.

• Get Info dates can now be edited without leaving Ferail. Creation, modification, and last-access rows open a validated local date/time editor; writes run off the UI thread and refresh the affected listing afterward. Windows uses FILE_WRITE_ATTRIBUTES, so folders and read-only files work without changing their attributes, and each write preserves the other two timestamps. Ferail now reads the selected value back after Windows closes the handle, so a provider that ignores or materially changes a folder date produces an error instead of a false success. Creation-time editing is Windows-only for now; Unix exposes the portable modification/access pair.

• This PC and Recycle Bin now have a safe browse-only Windows surface. Their Shell-only children, including connected provider/MTP containers, browse in a dedicated virtualized surface while real drive/folder paths immediately return to Ferail's normal filesystem engine. Shell enumeration runs in a cancellable, time-bounded disposable process; the tab retains only copied opaque PIDL bytes, never COM objects or fabricated paths. Enumeration streams from the broker through bounded queues, so large device folders can paint progressively without building duplicate full-list snapshots; repeated refreshes reuse identical copied identities. Pathless rows expose the real Windows menu through More…, while Shift+right-click opens that menu directly; its PIDLs travel over a validated broker pipe and selected commands refresh the namespace afterward. Filesystem-only shortcuts, toolbar commands and pane drops are suppressed in virtual locations, so they can never act on the directory that happened to be open before This PC or Recycle Bin. Ferail-owned open, properties, restore/delete, clipboard and drag operations for pathless items remain future work; only operations offered by the official Windows menu are currently available.

• WSL browsing no longer starts a distribution implicitly. Ferail invokes wsl.exe only after an explicit distribution or symlink activation; a failed ordinary UNC listing now remains a recoverable error. Navigating away or closing the tab/window cancels, kills and reaps an activation helper. The native Windows context menu also refuses WSL paths explicitly and rejects impractically large symbolic selections before materializing them.

• Get Info on Windows now includes approved Shell metadata and shortcut details. Explicit Get Info reads a small allow-list from IPropertyStore on a COM worker, keeps results in a bounded identity/revision cache, and appends owned text to the normal cross-platform sections. .lnk targets, arguments and working directories use the same revision-aware shortcut cache. GPS coordinates, arbitrary property blobs, COM interfaces and PIDLs never enter the UI model, logs or persistent storage. Property handlers now run in a disposable eight-second broker as well, so a crashing or stalled third-party metadata extension cannot take down Ferail or occupy one of its background workers forever.

• Windows file clipboard cut/copy semantics now interoperate with Explorer. Ferail publishes and reads the Shell's Preferred DropEffect alongside CF_HDROP, so files cut in either application paste as a move and ordinary copies remain copies. Ferail's cut-row marker is cleared only after a fully successful move. Native outbound drags expose both filesystem paths and the identity-preserving Shell ID-list format; Ctrl, Shift, Ctrl+Shift and Alt continue to negotiate Copy, Move and Create Shortcut with the drop target.

• Windows Open, Reveal and native verbs now report and refresh correctly. Failed default-app launches and Explorer reveals produce an actionable notification instead of disappearing silently. After the isolated Windows context-menu broker closes, Ferail refreshes only tabs showing the selected items' parent folders, so rename/delete/provider verbs become visible without a process-wide rescan.

• Opening a Windows shortcut now preserves Shell semantics. .lnk resolution runs in a dedicated COM STA through the process-wide bounded provider lane and a revision-aware memory-only cache. A shortcut to a real directory navigates inside Ferail; files and applications are invoked via the original shortcut so arguments and working-directory behavior are not lost. Broken and missing targets fail visibly, and stale results cannot land in a changed tab or row.

• Thumbnail work is now bounded across the whole process. List and grid viewports share one priority scheduler instead of starting independent batches in every window. Visible and selected images outrank overscan, duplicate requests share one provider call, Windows Shell thumbnail work is capped at four concurrent calls, and image construction/result application is spread across frames. A late result is applied only when its original surface generation and row identity still match.

• Windows Shell icon loading shares the same process budget. Native type icons, custom folder icons, the sidebar and the icon grid no longer create independent worker waves or fetch icons while updating GPUI state. Duplicate type/path requests coalesce, failures converge to the normal fallback icon, and completed images land under the same per-frame upload/apply limits as thumbnails.

• Tool results can open their location directly in a new tab. Right-click one Disk Usage square, recursive Search result, or Duplicate member and choose Open in New Tab. A folder opens directly; a file opens its containing folder and is selected there, while the result remains in place for comparison.

• Large folders, Flat View, recursive search, and Disk Usage enumerate much faster on macOS. Ferail now reads a directory's names, types, sizes, dates, flags and identities in native batches instead of issuing one metadata call per item. Recursive scans use bounded parallel directory reads on local APFS volumes while removable, network and unknown disks keep the conservative serial path.

• Closing Disk Usage releases its scan index. Its file identities and parent links now belong to the result surface instead of the process-wide navigation map, so scanning millions of files no longer permanently retains every discovered path. Explicit actions reconstruct only the paths they use.

• Incomplete Disk Usage scans are visible. The summary counts skipped folders instead of presenting a partial total as complete. On macOS, a scan that reaches protected folders offers Full Disk Access, also available in Settings › Performance; the faster reader itself does not require that permission.

This release publishes Windows x64 portable and symbols archives only. macOS and Linux remain on 0.6.5; Ferail's updater selects the newest release that actually has an asset for the current platform.

• Dragging and rubber-band selection stay responsive in large folders. Ferail no longer rebuilds or deep-clones the whole selected path set for every visible item while a drag is active. Edge autoscroll is time-paced rather than mouse-poll-rate-paced, unchanged grid viewports no longer resubmit thumbnail work, path icon/thumbnail cache reads no longer allocate temporary keys, and grid marquee selection visits only the cells its rectangle intersects before synchronizing the list once on release. Windows OLE drag-over events are also capped to a display-relevant cadence instead of forcing full app renders at the mouse report rate.

• A native Windows drag no longer leaves two icon stacks in Ferail. Once a drag first exits the source window, the Windows Shell drag image remains the sole visual for the rest of that gesture, including if the pointer comes back over Ferail. Ferail still restores the typed payload invisibly so its own folders remain valid drop destinations.

This release publishes Windows x64 portable and symbols archives only. macOS and Linux remain on 0.6.5; Ferail's updater selects the newest release that actually has an asset for the current platform.

• The real Windows file context menu is available on explicit demand. Ferail's fast right-click menu remains the default and now ends with “More options from Windows…”. Shift+right-click and Shift+F10 open the native Shell menu directly, including third-party verbs and owner-drawn submenus. Shell extensions run only in a disposable broker process: a crash cannot take Ferail down, and an extension that stalls while building the menu is terminated after a bounded preparation period. Once visible, the menu has no timeout and remains open as long as the user needs it. Ordinary commands are invoked synchronously; the special Properties verb is routed through Windows' dedicated property-sheet APIs so its interface survives the broker dispatch. Shift+right-click also suppresses Ferail's menu completely rather than stacking both menus.

• See which programs are locking a file, and close them, from the right-click menu (Windows). "What's Locking This?" on any file or folder, and "What's Blocking Eject?" on a removable volume in the sidebar, open a dialog naming every process that has the item open (via the Windows Restart Manager), each with a Close button plus Close All: programs are asked to quit politely first and only force-closed if they refuse, with a warning that unsaved changes can be lost. Before, this diagnosis only appeared after a copy or move had already failed. Folders and volumes are checked through a capped scan, and the dialog says so when a very large tree was sampled rather than fully checked.

• A failed USB eject on Windows now names the apps blocking it. The "couldn't eject" message used to show only a raw error; it now lists the programs with files open on the volume, and clicking one brings that program's window forward so you can close the offending files: the same behavior macOS already had.

• The Delete Immediately confirmation now opens with its Delete button focused. Confirming a permanent delete (Shift+Delete) no longer needs a Tab press or a mouse click first: Enter or Space activates the focused button right away, and pressing Enter while the dialog itself held focus no longer dismissed it without doing anything. The button's focus ring also drew with its bottom edge cut off by the dialog body; it now fits.

• Shift-clicking "Copy File List" now includes subfolder contents recursively. A plain click still copies the visible rows' paths; holding Shift follows every folder in the list and copies its entire subtree too, each folder's line followed by its name-sorted contents. The walk respects the hidden-files toggle, never follows symlinks, and runs in the background, finishing with a toast that says how many paths were copied. The menu item's tooltip points out the Shift option.

• Files can now be dragged from Ferail into Explorer and other Windows applications. Rows, grid items, and sidebar folders become a native Shell file drag with normal copy/move/link modifier behavior. The OLE session is started only after GPUI releases its input-state borrow, preventing the RefCell already borrowed crash seen during the first implementation; leaving and re-entering Ferail also hands the drag image cleanly between GPUI and Windows instead of drawing two icon stacks. Drop, cancellation, and failure all clear the platform drag state.

• Software Update on Windows downloaded the debug-symbols archive instead of the app. Since releases started shipping a …-win-x64-symbols.zip PDB bundle alongside the app zip (0.6.6), the updater grabbed whichever Windows zip GitHub listed first: the symbols one. The updater now skips symbols bundles, and the bundle was renamed to …-x64-symbols.zip (on the published 0.6.6 release too) so already-shipped builds also pick the right download.

This release publishes Windows x64 portable and symbols archives only. macOS and Linux remain on 0.6.5; Ferail's updater selects the newest release that actually has an asset for the current platform.

• A corrupt PDF can no longer occupy a thumbnail worker forever. Every Windows PDF open, parse, render and stream-read operation now shares one five-second deadline and is explicitly cancelled on expiry; unreadable documents fall back to their icon.

• Rapid scrolling and selection no longer leave trains of obsolete Windows preview work behind. Each file surface runs one thumbnail batch and keeps only the newest pending viewport, releasing cancelled reservations for a clean retry. Selecting a new document also terminates the previous preview broker immediately instead of waiting for its six-second deadline.

• Windows crash reports now say what Ferail was doing. The breadcrumb ring records path-free navigation generations, selection changes, preview cancellation/completion and thumbnail batch state. Native crash handling is re-armed after window/GPU initialization, and release PDBs now retain source line tables.

• Developer screenshot runs with a second window now exit cleanly. The deterministic --screenshot --properties repro retained dozens of gpui-component input callbacks and ended with an InputState leak assertion. Ferail drains those callbacks while their window is alive and removes harness windows before quitting; the same repro now exits zero.

• Windows release packages must be reproducible by default. Packaging now refuses a dirty source tree, with an explicit -AllowDirty escape hatch for local-only smoke packages, and records the release debug-information policy in the symbol manifest.

• Quitting can no longer crash with a "leaked handles" report in released builds. Beyond the reference cycles fixed above, a UI-library behavior still leaks an input handle whenever a second window (such as Get Info) was open, and the library's leak detector, a developer diagnostic, was compiled into the builds users download, turning that leak into an exit-101 crash with a scary report. Packaged builds no longer carry the detector; developer/test teardown now also drains the retained callbacks and closes harness windows before the assertion, while the upstream strong-capture design remains documented.

• Get Info now shows photo metadata. For images, the properties window gains an Image section: pixel dimensions, camera (make and model, deduplicated), lens, date taken, a one-line exposure summary (shutter, aperture, ISO, focal length), and the stored rotation when there is one. If the photo embeds GPS coordinates, a Location row says so: the coordinates themselves are deliberately not read, displayed, or stored. Works the same on every platform; unreadable or EXIF-less files simply show no section.

• Settings › Diagnostics has a new "Bug reports" section listing the folders that matter when filing an issue. The crash-reports folder (crash and freeze reports, native minidumps, saved report bundles) and the settings folder (settings file, metadata database, language packs) are shown with their paths and an Open folder button that browses them in a Ferail tab, creating the folder first if nothing was ever written to it.

• A crash in a terminal no longer floods the console. The crash output used to dump every breadcrumb and a long backtrace on stderr; now the console gets a short digest: the last few breadcrumbs, the most relevant stack frames, and the path of the full report, while the report file under the config folder's reports/ gets more than before: every breadcrumb plus the complete raw backtrace, with no environment variable needed. Native faults on Windows, previously silent on the console, now print one line naming the exception and the minidump path. Also fixed: a second crash in the same run used to overwrite the first report file (reports now append), and on Windows the "relevant frames" digest always said no Ferail frames were found: the filter only recognized Unix-style paths.

• C:\Windows\Fonts (and folders like it) no longer shows blank icons. The Fonts folder is a special Explorer location: Windows refuses the ordinary way of looking up icons and thumbnails for files inside it, so every font file showed an empty placeholder. Ferail now retries those lookups the way Explorer itself does, and font files get their proper icons, and their "Abg" preview cards where Windows provides them.

• Font previews are no longer upside down on Windows. The Windows component that renders "Abg" preview cards for font files hands its image back stored bottom-to-top, unlike every image thumbnail, with nothing in the data saying so. Those cards rendered rotated 180°; font files are now flipped correctly.

• Shortcuts (.lnk) show the shortcut arrow on their icon, like Explorer. A shortcut's icon used to be indistinguishable from the real file or app it points to; the arrow badge Explorer draws is now composed onto shortcut icons in the list, grid and sidebar.

• Windows thumbnails no longer look like screenshots of another app. For files with no thumbnail of their own (Word and Excel documents, PDFs on machines without a PDF thumbnailer, …), the icon grid and list used to show a capture of the file's preview component: the same live viewer Explorer's preview pane hosts: complete with its scrollbars, toolbars and window chrome. Thumbnails now show what Explorer shows: the file's real thumbnail when one exists, otherwise its type icon. Only the preview pane still falls back to that capture, where a document rendering with chrome beats a bare icon.

• PDFs get real thumbnails and previews on Windows, rendered by Windows itself. The first page is now drawn with the PDF renderer built into Windows (the one the Photos and Reader apps use), in the grid, the list, the preview pane and the viewer, instead of depending on whichever third-party PDF component is installed. It runs without any window or helper process, so it is also immune to the PDF preview crash that motivated the helper-process change below. Password-protected PDFs still show their icon.

• Preview components run inside a disposable Ferail helper, never the UI process. Loading the component directly into that short-lived process is intentional: the parent can terminate the exact process that owns a hung or faulting DLL. Windows' prevhost.exe surrogate remains a compatibility fallback for components that expose no in-process class. Components that only accept a stream or a shell item (Outlook .msg files, for instance) are initialized too, where before they were skipped.

• The preview pane no longer shows a big type icon for images Windows declines to thumbnail at preview size. For some files: OneDrive images, notably: Windows produces the small grid thumbnail but refuses the larger preview-pane extraction, and Ferail then showed the file type's icon even though the grid was showing the picture itself. The type icon used to be baked into the Windows fetch as its own fallback, which cut off every decoder queued behind it; it is now the very last resort across all platforms, after Ferail's own image decoding, cover art, and video poster tiers have had their turn. This also un-blocks poster frames for videos Windows can't thumbnail (MKV and friends with the mpv provider configured), which the early icon used to shadow.

• ferail thumb accepts relative paths and a --preview flag. The command-line thumbnail extractor used to fail silently on Windows unless given an absolute path; --preview asks for what the preview pane would show rather than the grid thumbnail.

• Quitting no longer ends in a "leaked handles" crash after using a context menu or the filter box. On Windows, closing Ferail after a normal session could exit with an error report about leaked PopupMenu and InputState handles: the very "crash" files testers sent for 0.6.5. The right-click menu and three text inputs (the filter box, the address editor, the shortcuts search) each kept a hidden reference to themselves, so they could never be released at shutdown. Those reference cycles are gone, and a dismissed context menu now frees its contents immediately instead of lingering until the next right-click.

• A broken PDF or Office preview can no longer crash Ferail on Windows. Third-party preview components (the ones other apps install so Explorer can draw document previews) used to run inside Ferail itself, so a faulty one (like the PDF previewer access violation reported against 0.6.5) could take the whole app down or hang it. Each preview now renders in a short-lived helper process: if the component crashes or stalls, only the helper dies, the file shows its icon instead, and a component that fails once is skipped for the rest of the session.

• Windows crashes in native code now leave a minidump next to the crash report. A fault inside a driver, shell extension, or preview component used to vanish without a trace: the text report only covered Rust-side panics. Ferail (and its preview helper) now write %APPDATA%\Ferail\reports\ferail-<role>-<pid>.dmp and note the exception code in ferail-crash-<pid>.txt; with the published symbols bundle that is enough to name the faulting module and line.

• The status bar's progress bar now sits beside the task it measures. It used to float at the far right of the status bar, over by the app statistics, visually orphaned from the "Scanning…"/"Copying…" text at the left. The strip now follows the task label directly.

• The Windows download now starts on a fresh PC, no Visual C++ install required. The 0.6.5 build could fail before showing a window with a VCRUNTIME140.dll was not found error, because it expected Microsoft's C++ runtime to already be present. Ferail now carries that runtime inside the executable, and packaging refuses to produce a build that quietly depends on any DLL Windows itself does not ship. Each Windows release now also comes with a matching debug-symbols bundle so crash reports from testers can be decoded against the exact published build. The Windows build remains unsigned, so SmartScreen still warns on first launch.

• Windows CPU usage now matches Task Manager, and redraw activity says what it measures. The status bar previously counted CPU as a percentage of one core, so a busy process could show 700% while Task Manager showed a much smaller whole-machine share. Windows now uses Task Manager's normalization, and the ambiguous rps label is now an explicit, localized redraws/s.

• Windows opens and reveals difficult paths through the Shell instead of a command line. Double-click no longer routes files through cmd /C start, which could select the wrong verb, and Reveal in Explorer now uses PIDL identity instead of an /select, string that failed on valid names with spaces or characters such as #, é, and !.

• File details now follow the viewport instead of scanning an entire folder. Format, Description, and quarantine information still appears as rows enter view, but opening a 10,000-file or multi-million-file location no longer opens every file in the background. Rapid scrolling coalesces work, navigation cancels stale reads, and the UI applies each result directly to its handful of rows rather than walking the whole listing again.

• Include Subfolders' keyboard shortcut now installs on every platform. The command and action both existed, but the keymap bridge omitted their final connection, so startup warned about view.toggle_flat and skipped Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+L. The shortcut now reaches the existing action normally.

• Rapid selection changes no longer accumulate preview providers. Image and text previews now keep one active request and only the newest request waiting behind it. Holding an arrow key across a large media folder therefore uses constant queue space and cannot start one native preview handler per crossed row; active preview work is also visible in diagnostic task snapshots.

• Leaving Include Subfolders now releases its large row buffers. Clearing a multi-million-file Flat listing destroyed its rows but retained the backing vector's full capacity, which could leave hundreds of megabytes resident until Ferail quit. Flat-only row and filtered-row storage is now returned to the allocator while ordinary directory reloads still reuse their much smaller buffers.

• Include Subfolders: every file under this folder, in one list. A third view button (⌘⇧L, or the View menu) turns the current location into a files-only listing of everything below it, subfolder contents included, in the same table you already know. Rows appear as Ferail walks the tree rather than after it finishes, the breadcrumb counts the files and folders it has been through, and you can cancel or refresh the scan at any point. A new sortable Path column shows where each file actually lives, and typing in the filter narrows the finished list without touching the disk again. There is no cap on how many files it will show, and everything it learned about your folder structure is dropped when you close the view. Multi-million-row Select All no longer expands into millions of in-memory selection records, Copy File List stays responsive while preparing very large lists, long names preserve their beginning, middle, and end, and large counts use grouped digits such as 4.138.016.

• Generate and verify a file's SHA-256 without leaving Ferail. The File menu, row context menu, and command palette open a cancellable streaming calculation with progress and a Copy button. If the clipboard contains one SHA-256, Ferail trims surrounding whitespace, accepts common checksum-file formats, and shows an explicit match or mismatch. The expected value is editable, and Clear affects only the dialog, never the system clipboard.

• The status bar now shrinks to fit instead of running off the window. In a narrow window, or a language with longer words, where French turned "up 3m" into "en service depuis 3m": the bar's right-hand end used to be pushed past the edge, taking the Show Hidden switch with it. It now steps down as room runs out: fuller phrases first give way to short ones ("126.3 GB free on Macintosh HD" → "126.3 GB free" → "126.3 GB", "up 3m" → "UP 3m"), then the text drops a size, and only then do readouts start dropping: the app's own CPU/memory figures first, the folder's own numbers last. The item count and the Show Hidden switch are always there, whatever the width; at the narrowest the switch keeps its label as a tooltip.

• Sort a folder by how often you go there. The toolbar's sort menu used to offer only Name, Size, Kind and Date Modified: the same four you get by clicking a column header. It now has a fifth, Ant Trail, which ranks subfolders by their visit heat so the places you actually browse rise to the top; picking it again flips to coldest-first. Files and folders you've never opened stay below, in name order. Include Subfolders doesn't offer it: those rows carry no heat.

• The filter field has a ✕ to clear it. Typing a filter left you with no way back but selecting the text and deleting it; the button appears as soon as there's something to clear and restores the unfiltered folder.

• Fixed: sorting by Ant Trail could do nothing until you changed folder. After closing Include Subfolders, the list kept an empty Path column and still counted itself a subfolder listing, so an Ant Trail pick fell back to sorting by name: the warm folders stayed where they were. Leaving Include Subfolders now clears that state properly, and the Ant Trail order is decided from the rows themselves, so it can't be silently ignored again.

• Favorites are marked in search and duplicate results too. A file you had starred showed its star in an ordinary folder listing but not in the results of a search or a duplicate scan, exactly where knowing "this one I care about" matters most before you delete something.

• Large folders take noticeably less memory to hold open. Every row carries its name plus its size, type and description text, and each row used to own a private copy of all of it. Rows that say the same thing, and in a big folder most of them do, now share one copy, taking a row from 264 bytes to 160. On a folder with a million entries that is roughly 100 MB Ferail no longer keeps. Viewport-scoped work and bounded refreshes also avoid spending time on rows that are not visible. These improvements apply to every listing, not only Include Subfolders, so ordinary large folders are faster too; at multi-million scale, the remaining cost now follows the actual data volume.

• A freeze in a terminal launch now prints a short summary instead of thousands of lines. The hang report used to be echoed to stderr in full (every loaded system library included) which pushed the one useful line, the path to the saved report, far out of view. The console now gets a digest: where the UI thread is stuck (innermost frames), the longest-running background task, your last action, and the report path; the complete report, with all thread stacks, still goes to the file you attach to an issue. Set FERAIL_FULL_HANG_REPORT=1 to get everything on stderr again.

• The viewer is better suited to visual comparison and overlays. Its filename now appears only in the native title bar, a live opacity control fades the whole window from 100% down to 20%, and Stay on top can accompany another app's native full-screen Space on macOS. The mpv backend also disables the four remaining built-in Lua scripts (select, positioning, commands, and context-menu), closing the second LuaJIT hardened-runtime crash path left in 0.5.2.

• The toolbar now folds into its ⋯ menu instead of running off the edge of a narrow window. As the window narrows the bar sheds clusters in order: the icon-size bar first, then Dock and Show Desktop, then the icon-size buttons, then Sort, and last of all New Folder and Refresh, and everything it sheds turns up in the ⋯ menu in the same order it had in the bar. The list/icon view switcher never folds, and the filter field gives up width only once there is nothing left to fold. Previously a window under about 880 px wide pushed the ⋯ button itself off the edge, taking Get Info, Disk Usage, Find Duplicates and Empty Trash out of reach along with it.

• Icon view has a size bar, and it reaches much smaller and much larger sizes than before. Click or drag anywhere along it to pick any size you like instead of stepping between five fixed ones, and watch the grid re-lay-out as you drag. The range now runs from 32 px, small enough to skim a big folder, up to 512 px, where a photo is genuinely previewable. The − and ＋ buttons stay, and now jump to the next stop past the size you are on rather than snapping to the nearest one, so ＋ always makes icons bigger. A new reset button beside them returns to the default 128 px in one click. The slider hides itself on windows too narrow to hold it, leaving the buttons in charge.

• You can choose how a photo fills its icon. Settings › Layout › Icon fit offers Best fit (the whole image with bars beside it: what icon view has always done, and still the default), Fill frame (crop the edges so the image fills the square completely), Fit width and Fit height (match one edge and let the other letterbox or crop), and Stretch. The filling modes pull a slightly larger preview than Best fit does, since they magnify the image further; at the very largest icon sizes they can still look a little softer than Best fit.

• Find Similar Images extends the duplicate finder without exposing your photo library. It groups resized and recompressed versions using dual perceptual hashes and a chain-resistant similarity pass, then reuses the virtualized duplicate cards with private in-memory thumbnails, dimensions, distance, and a best-copy keeper. Reclaim totals follow the chosen keeper; unsafe bulk keep-newest and clone replacement are unavailable. Paths, pixels, thumbnails, and perceptual hashes are neither persisted nor sent over the network. Use Cmd+Shift+S to start a scan; in its results, Up/Down moves through candidates and Space or a double-click opens the current group in the full-size viewer. Structure and detail controls can now tighten or relax the live grouping without rereading photos, and the panel explains whether it is enumerating folders, analyzing a known image total, or grouping the results.

• The update check no longer hides an update you can actually install. When a release ships for some platforms before others, Ferail now offers the newest release that has a download for your operating system and processor, and mentions the still-newer one as a separate note naming the platforms it exists for, instead of reporting the global latest and leaving you with no Download button. "What's new" stops at the version you can install, so the notes describe what you are about to get. Automatic notifications stay limited to updates this machine can install.

Fixes a macOS crash while browsing folders containing videos when the mpv backend is selected. The signed release now disables libmpv's unused built-in Lua scripts before initialization, preventing Homebrew's LuaJIT from creating an executable page that the hardened runtime rejects. Video decoding, live filters, audio, seeking, and poster thumbnails remain enabled.

Windows fixes for 0.5.0's archive work, which was only exercised on macOS and Linux before release. Adding files to a ZIP, by dropping them on it, or by saving the workbench: failed with "the process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process": the rewritten archive was still open when Ferail tried to swap it in, which Windows refuses and Unix allows. Converting an archive failed with "Access is denied" for a related reason, a flush issued through a read-only handle. macOS and Linux were unaffected, so 0.5.0 remains current there.

Archives become a place you work, not just a list you look at. ZIPs have a transactional editing workbench, members drag out to Finder and to Ferail's own windows as native file promises, and files dragged the other way are added to a ZIP in place: every write staged and swapped in atomically, so a cancelled or failed operation leaves the original untouched. Ferail also speaks French and German now, with importable language packs for anything else, and it can check GitHub for a newer version when you ask it to (daily checks are opt-in; with them off it makes no network requests on its own). Crash and freeze reports survive the failures they describe.

• Crash and freeze reports are harder to lose or deadlock. Rust panics now persist an essential crash report before collecting the full backtrace, and the independent freeze watchdog never waits on a diagnostic mutex that the stalled UI thread might own. Its heartbeat state machine is covered through suspect, one-shot report, recovery/re-arm, and system-sleep cases; as before, hard process death still belongs to the operating system's crash reporter.

• Dropping files or folders onto a ZIP adds them to it. Drag anything onto an archive in the list or grid and it is added in place, no need to open the archive first; a dropped folder brings its contents, and a name already in the archive is reported instead of quietly shadowing the original. Archives that cannot be modified in place (7-Zip, TAR and its compressed variants, single-file GZ/BZ2/XZ, LHA) show the forbidden cursor and refuse the drop rather than letting the files land in the surrounding folder by accident. Members dragged out of another archive can be dropped on a ZIP too. Adding is transactional: the archive is staged and swapped in atomically, so a cancelled or failed add leaves the original untouched instead of possibly leaving a half-written entry inside it. If some dropped items were already in the archive, Ferail now names them instead of reporting a clean success.

• ZIP archives now have a transactional editing workbench. Drag files or folders into the archive (including onto an inner folder), rename entries, and stage removals, then review the projected result and choose Save Changes or Revert. Saving writes and validates a sibling archive before atomically replacing the original; cancellation, write failure, or an archive changed by another app leaves the original untouched. Other archive formats and ZIP-based packages such as DOCX/JAR/APK stay browse-only and show a lock badge, forbidden cursor, and explanation when a drop cannot be accepted. Archive rows now also expose packed size, compression method, checksum, permissions, encryption, and comments when their format records them. They use the same deceptive-filename highlighting as normal files. Convert Archive… creates a separately named ZIP, 7-Zip, TAR, TAR.GZ, TAR.BZ2, or TAR.XZ, validates it, and preserves the source. Extraction now also refuses pre-existing destination symlinks/reparse points and codec-specific link or special-file entries, in addition to the existing absolute/.. zip-slip checks. Archive members can now be dragged from a popped-out workbench to Finder on macOS using native file promises: decoding starts only after the external drop and runs off the GUI thread. The same gesture now crosses into another Ferail window, where dropping on the list extracts into its current folder and dropping on a folder row extracts there: previously the drop silently did nothing in Ferail (while working in Finder) because the window never registered itself as a destination for promised files. No placeholder file is created, and a workbench overlapping its parent can drop straight into the underlying main window. Dropped members land in the destination under their own name, the same way the identical drag onto Finder behaves: a file arrives as alpha.txt, a dragged folder brings its subtree, and neither is wrapped in an extra folder named after the archive; a name already in use is kept as alpha (2).txt rather than overwritten. List and grid folder targets plus Browse-tree, volume, available favorite rows, sidebar Locations, and breadcrumb segments highlight and extract into the selected folder: sidebar Locations such as Downloads and Desktop, and breadcrumb segments, previously ignored dropped archive members entirely, and every target keeps its highlight during the cross-window part of the drag, where nothing used to light up. Dragging members out now also works from a docked archive view, not only a popped-out one. Crossing a Ferail window edge no longer makes GPUI discard the archive payload, so leaving and re-entering restores the red forbidden feedback and the eventual drop still commits. Dropping a member back on its own archive is a cancelled drag and no longer bubbles into the current folder. Renamed compressed TAR downloads such as backup.tar (1).gz are detected from the decoded TAR header and show their real inner tree.

• Check for Updates now always gives a visible, recoverable result. The native menu command raises an already-open Software Update dialog instead of appearing to do nothing, and recovers if its original window vanished. Offline, timeout, missing-page, rate-limit, server, and malformed-response failures now explain what happened and offer Retry; checks stop after 20 seconds, and interrupted downloads no longer leave .part files behind.

• Ferail can now speak your language. Settings › Appearance has a new Language group: follow the system language, or pick a language pack: French and German ship built in, and anyone can add another without a code change. New language… writes a template file with every string and a set of translation instructions; give that file to a translator or to an AI assistant (Claude, ChatGPT, a local model: Ferail itself never calls one and needs no API key), then Import… the result. Export… saves a language to finish or share it, and the dropdown shows how much of the UI each pack covers. Switching takes effect immediately, menus included; anything a pack doesn't cover stays in English.

• Every failure toast with real error text can now be expanded and copied. The "Show details" / "Copy" controls that the structured failure reports already had now also cover the trash, de-duplicate, save-report, move-to-trash and disk-full failures, which used to show a clipped one-liner you couldn't read in full or paste into a bug report.

• Opening a window no longer freezes when your last folder was on a sleeping drive. Ferail reopens at the folder you left off in; if that folder lives on an external disk that has spun down (or a network share that's slow to answer), every new window, including Cmd+N, used to sit frozen for seconds while the disk woke up. The window now opens at once, showing the folder's breadcrumbs with an "Opening …" note in the status bar, and fills in when the disk answers. A folder that no longer exists falls back to Home, as before. Folder icons in the icon grid and the sidebar are fetched the same way now, one custom-icon folder on a slow volume can't stall scrolling anymore.

• Ferail can now tell you when a newer version exists: if you ask it to. A new Ferail → Check for Updates… menu item asks GitHub Releases for the latest version and shows the result in a Software Update dialog: when something newer exists the dialog shows what's new: the release notes from GitHub, rendered right there, and if you skipped a few versions, the notes of every release you missed, so you decide with the changes in front of you; then download the right file for your machine (macOS disk image, Windows zip, Debian/Ubuntu package for your CPU) straight into Downloads with live progress, then open it or show it in the folder, installing stays your step, Ferail never replaces itself. A separate Settings → About → Updates switch turns on a daily automatic check that posts a notification when a new version appears; it is off by default, and with it off Ferail makes no network requests on its own. Nothing is ever downloaded without you choosing to.

The Linux build becomes actually usable (a font-lookup/backtrace stack-up had it at seconds per frame), and a batch of features lands: a filter box that understands metadata expressions and suggests its syntax, freeze diagnostics (automatic hang reports, --safe-mode), a viewer that fits media to the window, a folder context menu on empty space, an honest status bar under a filter, and eject that first releases Ferail's own holds. Linux .debs and the Windows zip are built by CI; Windows remains unsigned (SHA-256 on the release page).

• Linux: the app no longer crawls at seconds per frame. On a stock Linux install the interface was barely usable: every repaint took seconds and input lagged far behind. Two causes stacked: the UI font the toolkit asks for by default ("IBM Plex Sans", which Zed bundles and Ferail does not) isn't installed, so every piece of text on screen walked a nine-deep fallback list on every frame; and Ferail's own crash-diagnostics default (RUST_BACKTRACE=1) made each of those misses capture a full stack trace. Ferail now picks an installed system font once at startup (Adwaita Sans / Ubuntu / Cantarell / Noto Sans / DejaVu Sans, in that order; Noto Sans first under KDE) and a real monospace face for code previews (which used to fall through to a proportional font), and it no longer lets the crash-diagnostics backtrace setting leak into ordinary error handling on any platform: panics still get full backtraces. Set RUST_LIB_BACKTRACE=1 yourself if you want library errors to carry one.

• The viewer now fits media to the window by default, and you can pick a different default. Small images and videos used to open as a tiny postage stamp in the middle of the window (the viewer fitted large media down but never enlarged anything); now everything opens filling the window. If you preferred the old pixel-true behaviour, a new Settings → Layout → Viewer → Default zoom dropdown offers "Fit, never enlarge" and "Actual size (100%)" alongside the new "Fit to window" default; the choice also sets what zoom reset (⌘0) and the double-click fit toggle return to, and applies from the next viewer window you open.

• A frozen app now explains itself. If the interface stops responding for about ten seconds, Ferail automatically writes a hang report: what background work was running, the recent action history (path-redacted, honoring the privacy toggle), and on macOS full stack traces of every thread, to the same reports/ folder as the issue bundle, and keeps running in case it recovers. Launched from a terminal, pressing Ctrl+\ (macOS/Linux) or Ctrl+Break (Windows) writes the same report on demand and exits; Ctrl+C on a frozen app writes one on the way out too. On Linux, stack traces are included when elfutils or gdb is installed. Attach the report when filing a freeze issue.

• New --safe-mode launch flag (or FERAIL_SAFE_MODE=1) for freeze hunting. It starts the app with every optional background subsystem off: file watching, folder sizes, thumbnails, format detection, the metadata database, free-space lookups, and the volume/power/stats watchers, so one relaunch answers whether a freeze comes from the background work. Settings are untouched; a normal restart brings everything back. Favorites, Recents, and Ant Trail stay empty for the safe-mode session by design.

• The filter box now filters by metadata values, not just names. Typing size:>10mb, mod:week, created:2026-01-01..2026-06-30, kind:folder, ext:pdf, or locked:yes narrows the listing by the file's actual size, dates, kind, extension, or locked flag: alone or combined with ordinary text (report ext:pdf mod:month). Plain words keep working exactly as before, and anything unrecognized is treated as literal text rather than guessed at. The same tokens work when Enter escalates the filter into a recursive search, whichever engine runs it (Spotlight or the built-in walker). Dates accept today, yesterday, week, month, year, comparisons (mod:>2026-01-01), and ranges; sizes accept the units the Size column shows. Wrap a phrase in quotes to match it with its spaces.

• The filter box suggests its own syntax as you type. Start typing a token key and a completion menu offers the supported filters: type lo and it offers locked: with a one-line description; accept it and the menu chains into the valid values (yes / no, or ready-made examples like size:>1mb and mod:today). Clearing the field shows the full token list once, so the syntax is discoverable without reading docs. Arrow keys and Enter pick from the menu while it's open; Esc dismisses it, and plain typing is never interrupted: the menu only appears when what you're typing looks like a token.

• A (?) button beside the filter field opens a filter-syntax cheat sheet. One click lists every supported token with its accepted values and examples, plus the date and size rules, so you never have to remember the syntax or hunt for it in the docs. Esc or a click outside closes it.

• The mpv video player now works in release downloads, no rebuild needed. The optional mpv backend (plays virtually any video format, and powers live grading and the transparent chroma-key windows) used to require compiling Ferail from source with a special flag. Release builds now ship with the provider compiled in; it stays dormant until you install mpv's library (macOS: brew install mpv; Windows: a libmpv build; Linux: libmpv2, which the .deb now pulls in automatically on current distributions) and pick mpv under Settings → Plugins. Ferail still does not bundle libmpv itself, without it the built-in player works as before.

• Right-clicking the file list's empty space now opens a folder menu. Right-clicking below the last row, or anywhere in an empty folder: used to do nothing. It now opens a context menu of commands that act on the folder you're browsing: New Folder, Paste, Select All, Get Info, Reveal in Finder, Copy Path, Open Terminal Here, Add Folder to Favorites, and Refresh. The menu targets the folder itself, never the current selection, matching what Finder does on its window background.

• The status bar now says how much the filter field is hiding. Typing in the filter narrowed the listing, but the item count and total size beside it silently narrowed too, "11 items · 214 KB" looked like the whole folder when it was only the matches. The count now carries a companion figure for what the filter is holding back, "11 items · 214.3 KB" now sits beside "16 filtered out · 281.1 KB", so the rest of the folder, and its size, is never a mystery. When the filter matches nothing at all, the status bar says "All 60 items filtered out · 15.0 MB" and the empty listing says "All 60 items filtered out." instead of claiming the folder is empty, which used to send you looking for files that were only being filtered.

• Ejecting a volume you're still browsing now works. Eject used to fail with "Ferail has files open on it" when the app itself was the culprit: a tab open on the volume, an archive being browsed, or a viewer window playing a file from it was enough. Eject now first releases Ferail's own holds: tabs on the volume (in every window) go back to your home folder, archive and disk-usage views rooted on it close, and viewer windows playing from it close; then the eject proceeds, waiting a moment and retrying once so the freed files are really closed. And when another app still blocks the eject, the failure message shows each blocking app as a clickable button: clicking one brings that app to the front so you can close whatever it has open on the volume and try again. (Buttons for processes without windows, like background daemons, do nothing; on Linux and Windows the names are shown but aren't clickable yet.)

First release with Linux downloads (Ubuntu/Debian .deb, Intel and ARM), and the first where dragging files out of Ferail to other apps works on macOS. macOS remains signed + notarized; Windows remains unsigned (SHA-256 on the release page).

• Dragging files out of Ferail into other apps now works, with full Finder semantics. Dragging rows, grid cells, or sidebar folders to Finder, the Desktop, an editor, or any other app never actually worked: the drag ghost just stopped at the edge of the window and nothing was handed to the system, because the UI framework's drag was in-window only and the code wrongly believed otherwise. Ferail now promotes a drag to a native macOS drag session the moment the pointer leaves the window, and the drop behaves exactly like a drag started in Finder: a drop on the same volume moves the files, a drop on another volume copies them (with the system's green “+” badge on the cursor), holding ⌥ forces a copy, ⌘ forces a move, ⌃ drops an alias, and pressing Esc cancels the drag, inside or outside the window, with the items animating back to where they came from. Entries inside an archive are the one exception: they have no on-disk files until extracted, so they still only drag within the window.
• The status bar shows what Ferail itself costs. A quiet readout on the right, "up 3d 4h · CPU 0.2% · MEM 184.0 MB · 0 rps", reports how long the app has been running, its CPU share, its memory footprint, and how many times per second the window redrew. All figures are about Ferail, not the machine: the last figure is deliberately labelled rps (redraws per second), not "fps": the app only draws when something changes, so an idle window honestly reads 0, and any number it shows is a plain count of real redraws rather than a claim about animation smoothness. A nonzero value while you aren't doing anything means something is wastefully repainting. CPU is counted the way Activity Monitor does, so it can exceed 100% on multi-core work. Each number sits in a fixed-width slot, so the bar doesn't shift around as values update. The readout appears a few seconds after launch, once the first reliable sample exists.
• Ferail can be packaged as an Ubuntu/Debian .deb. The repo now carries a freedesktop desktop entry, the app icon in the standard hicolor location, and cargo deb packaging metadata; every window identifies itself to the desktop environment as ferail, so docks and taskbars show the right icon and group Ferail windows together. Verified end to end on Ubuntu 24.04 (arm64): the package builds, installs, and the installed app launches and browses folders. CI builds both the Intel (amd64) and ARM (arm64) packages against Ubuntu 22.04, so they run on 22.04 and later, and they are attached to the GitHub release as public downloads, starting with this release. Opening a specific folder from the desktop ("Open with Ferail") isn't wired yet: the binary doesn't take a directory argument.
• Fixed a crash-on-build for ARM Linux. Owner/group name lookup used a buffer type that only compiles where C's char is signed: fine on Intel/macOS, a build failure on ARM Linux (Raspberry Pi class machines, ARM servers, Apple-Silicon VMs).
• Choose your terminal. Settings → Files → Terminal picks which terminal "Open Terminal Here" launches: an app name or .app bundle on macOS, a program path, or a command on PATH: with your own launch arguments ({dir} expands to the folder) and a Standard/Administrator mode. Blank keeps the platform default: Terminal.app, Windows Terminal, or the usual Linux emulator hunt. Administrator means a UAC prompt on Windows and a root shell in the terminal on macOS and Linux.
• Paste, move, rename, and the result is selected for you. When an operation finishes in the folder you're still looking at, what it produced is selected and scrolled into view: pasted and moved files, a renamed item, a new folder, a duplicate, an alias. Previously a paste into a long listing gave no sign of where the file landed.
• Hidden files are easier to reason about. With Show hidden on, hidden entries render dimmed so they read as distinct from your real files. With it off, the status bar quietly reports what's out of sight, "3 hidden · 12.1 KB", so you know hidden content exists, and how much space it takes, without unhiding it.
• Diagnostics can take you to the files it talks about. Settings → Diagnostics now shows the full path of the running app, and every row about a location on disk: the app itself, the config folder, the settings file, the metadata database, mpv: has a Reveal button that opens that spot in Ferail with the item selected.
• Read-only volumes are detected on Windows and Linux. The status bar says "{volume} is read-only" instead of reporting "0 B free", which is true on a CD but buries the actual story.
• Text previews handle legacy single-byte files. Old README and .nfo files written in ISO-8859-1 (Amiga/DOS-era exports) now preview as text instead of being rejected as binary.
• Folder sizes stop re-measuring themselves. Returning to the app used to re-walk every visible folder tree from scratch, so on a big folder the Size column could never settle. It now answers from cache and only recomputes what actually went stale; Refresh is still the gesture that forces a fresh measure.
• Fixed: folders labelled as archives. Some folders showed a file format such as "ZIP archive · 3 files" in the Format and Description columns, inherited from a stale cache entry for a path that used to be a file. Folders are now guarded from format detection at every layer, and existing bad entries clear themselves on next launch.
• Delete Immediately is findable. The permanent-delete command (Shift+Delete, or Option+Cmd+Delete on macOS) was missing from the Cmd+K command palette and the keyboard-shortcut sheet, so it could only be reached from a menu.

First release with a Windows download. Also the release that unbroke the Windows build, which had been failing to compile on main for two weeks without anyone noticing, because nothing in CI ever built it.

• Windows builds are back, and now ship. A single IMFMediaEngine::SetMuted call written from a Mac on 2026-07-14 could not compile under the windows crate's type inference, and took the whole Windows app down with it. Fixed, and with it the app builds, runs, passes its tests, and screenshots on Windows again.
• Windows packaging: scripts/package-win.ps1 produces a portable ZIP (Ferail.exe, the ferail CLI, and the licence notices), plus an installer with a Start Menu entry and an uninstaller when Inno Setup is present. Authenticode signing is wired but this release is unsigned, so Windows shows a SmartScreen warning: verify the download instead: Ferail-0.2.2-win-x64.zip is SHA-256 9993AF0EF53DE617C255BF9EBBA7FF53DFB3EDDC80866FF5D969715A78F30E6B.
• Fixed: the viewer's "Stay on Top" did nothing on Windows. The toggle never reached the OS. It now really does keep the window above other apps.
• Note that nothing automatically builds Windows yet, so the class of breakage above can still recur: it is caught only by someone building on a Windows machine.
• Fixed: a fresh git clone could not build on any platform. The workspace manifest referenced checkouts that only exist on one developer's machine, so cargo failed before it compiled anything.
• The shipped binary carries no GPL-3.0 code. A single non-optional dependency edge (gpui → sum_tree → ztracing) pulled GPL-3.0-or-later crates into every build, which is incompatible with distributing a binary under MIT/Apache-2.0. Ferail now vendors that one Apache-2.0 crate with the edge removed. Related correction: THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md previously said the edge was already gone upstream: it was not; the lockfile that suggested so had been generated with an unrelated local override active.
• No user-visible macOS changes.

• Fixed: the 0.2.0 app would not launch on a Mac without Homebrew. It quit immediately with a dyld "Library not loaded: /opt/homebrew/opt/xz/lib/liblzma.5.dylib" error. The xz/LZMA support added in 0.2.0 linked against whatever liblzma the build machine happened to have instead of bundling its own, so the app only ran on machines that already had Homebrew's xz installed. liblzma is now compiled into the binary, and the macOS packaging script refuses to build a release that references any library outside /usr/lib and /System.
• The macOS app bundle now carries LICENSE-MIT, LICENSE-APACHE and THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md in Contents/Resources/licenses.

• Archive support (compress & extract): right-click Extract on any .zip, .tar, .tar.gz/.tgz, .tar.bz2, .tar.xz, .gz, .bz2, .xz, or .7z, then Extract Here (into the current folder) or Extract To… (pick a destination). Extraction lands in place when the archive holds a single top-level folder, or in a new folder named after the archive otherwise, and it's safe against malicious archive paths (no writing outside the destination). Compress is now a submenu offering ZIP, 7-Zip, and TAR (Gzip / Bzip2 / XZ / uncompressed), powered by a new built-in archive engine (no more shelling out to ditto), so it works the same on every platform.
• New Archive dialog: "New Archive…" in the Compress menu opens a dialog to pick the format (ZIP / 7-Zip / TAR.GZ / TAR.BZ2 / TAR.XZ / TAR), the compression level (Store / Fast / Normal / Maximum), and an optional password, instead of taking the one-click defaults.
• Add files to a zip by dropping them in: drag files from Finder or the file list onto an open archive to add them in place (ZIP only; formats that can't be edited show no drop target). Names already in the archive are reported rather than silently duplicated.
• Browse inside archives: right-click a file → Open as Archive to open its contents (like Disk Usage): a real, sortable file list with the usual columns, expandable folders, and a filter box, so a 5000-file archive opens as one folder to drill into, not 5000 rows. Then Extract Selected (a selected folder brings its whole subtree) or Extract All. It works on anything that is an archive underneath, even without the extension (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, .jar, .apk) and says so plainly when a file isn't one. Formats that can't be edited in place (tar, 7z) are marked read-only. The workbench can also be popped out into its own window (and docked back), like Disk Usage: handy for dragging files into an archive with Finder open beside it. You can also drag entries out of an archive onto a folder row or another Ferail window to extract them there (dragging to Finder itself is still to come).
• Richer 7-Zip descriptions: .7z files now show their file count, root folder, and whether they're encrypted in the Description column, the same way ZIPs already did.

First signed & notarized macOS build.

• Folder contents at a glance: folders now show their recursive item counts ("1,204 files · 88 folders") in the Description column.
• Easier favorites: "Add to Favorites" is now in the File menu, and you can drag a folder straight onto an empty Favorites list (it's a proper drop zone now).
• Filenames truncate in the middle: long names in the list keep their start and their extension visible ("Annual Board Meeting…approved).pdf"), Finder-style, instead of losing the end.
• Tidier viewer: the viewer toolbar folds into a "…" menu when the window is too narrow to fit every button.
• Fixed: typing a name into the New Folder / Rename dialogs now works: those fields were silently ignoring keystrokes.
• Fixed: resizing a column while a folder is still loading now sticks: the width no longer snapped back while background work was running.

• Runs on AROS: Ferail now boots on AROS (aarch64) with menus, previews, and disk usage.
• Windows & Linux caught up: resilient file operations with clear errors when a file is busy, OneDrive/Trash/Open-With integration, native video, and Finder-style "Eject All" everywhere.
• Image previews without macOS: a built-in thumbnail renderer means previews work off macOS too.
• Calmer on slow media: spun-down drives and network mounts no longer freeze the window.

• Media viewer: images and video with zoom/pan, rotation, slideshow, In/Out cues, one-click enhance, and transparent stacking windows.
• Icon (grid) view and a Finder-style drag with real thumbnails and spring-loaded folders.
• Find things: recursive + Spotlight search and a duplicate finder, each in its own tab.
• Disk Usage: treemap with a Top-N panel and HTML export.
• Richer previews: inline text/code with syntax highlighting and formatted markdown.
• Command palette (Cmd+K) and a keyboard-shortcuts overlay.

• Rebuilt on a new rendering foundation, then filled in the essentials: multi-window tabs, a curated Favorites sidebar, sortable columns, copy / move / trash with progress and undo, Get Info, and background folder sizes.
• Started as a native macOS file explorer with real icons, magic-byte file detection, quarantine badges, and drag-out to Finder.