File Pilot: A file explorer built for speed with a modern, robust interface

Re:File Pilot: A file explorer built for speed with a modern... by nipperkinfeet on Tuesday February 18, 2025 @08:40PM (#43097550)

Wow, after so many useless bloated Electron based applications over the years, this is like a breath of fresh air. This is so fast, lightweight, portable, and uses only 17 MB of memory with XL icons of over 10k photos. Very impressive. If only more developers would quit their laziness and make such software again.

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Re:File Pilot: A file explorer built for speed with a modern... by quyleanh on Tuesday February 18, 2025 @09:34PM (#43097920)

Totally agree! Let's make a real joy such like this one. I feel a great sense of satisfaction and excitement watching the File Pilot development process.

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Re:File Pilot: A file explorer built for speed with a modern... by stavros on Wednesday February 19, 2025 @02:52AM (#43099723)

What GUI framework did they use for this?

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Re:File Pilot: A file explorer built for speed with a modern... by qingcharles on Wednesday February 19, 2025 @02:55AM (#43099739)

This is all I found:

"It's written in C and has custom OpenGL renderer."

https://filepilot.handmade.network/

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Re:File Pilot: A file explorer built for speed with a modern... by sachahjkl on Wednesday February 19, 2025 @03:29AM (#43099905)

Made it himself

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Re:File Pilot: A file explorer built for speed with a modern... by pjc50 on Wednesday February 19, 2025 @05:42AM (#43100693)

It looks like WPF but isn't. Sibling comment suggests sui generis, which explains the tiny size and lack of dependencies. This does make it blindingly fast but makes the keymappings different from what you'd normally expect. Haven't tested annoying cases e.g. two monitors with different DPI.

edit: report of poor CJK support https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43100494 ; Windows file system encoding is annoying because it's UTF-16.

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Re:File Pilot: A file explorer built for speed with a modern... by regularfry on Wednesday February 19, 2025 @09:12AM (#43102353)

This is always, always the tradeoff with custom UIs. The edge cases eat you alive.

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Re:File Pilot: A file explorer built for speed with a modern... by whartung on Wednesday February 19, 2025 @11:12AM (#43103706)

I'm sorry, as I don't know.

I mean, I don't even know what you use to write "windows" applications anymore.

But are the stock frameworks that slow to justify rewriting the toolkit? I am under the impression that writing GUI toolkits was Hard.

Are there plans to make this cross platform?

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Re:File Pilot: A file explorer built for speed with a modern... by vjekoslav on Wednesday February 19, 2025 @05:55AM (#43100774)

It was written from scratch with a custom OpenGL renderer (a DirectX port is in progress for Windows) and a custom IMGUI layer on top.

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Re:File Pilot: A file explorer built for speed with a modern... by zerr on Wednesday February 19, 2025 @10:48AM (#43103365)

You mean all those complex UI stuff code is written in immediate GUI? How maintainable/readable is the resulting code?

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Re:File Pilot: A file explorer built for speed with a modern... by vjekoslav on Wednesday February 19, 2025 @11:55AM (#43104324)

Way more maintainable than anything from MS that I'd have to deal with.

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Re:File Pilot: A file explorer built for speed with a modern... by zerr on Thursday February 20, 2025 @09:17AM (#43114909)

How about the CPU usage? Running a main loop at 60hz for a file manager sounds bit overkill.

Agree about the MS offerings. That's why I use cross-platform frameworks (wx, qt) even for the Win-only apps.

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Re:File Pilot: A file explorer built for speed with a modern... by GuestHNUser on Thursday February 20, 2025 @04:00PM (#43120135)

Give the demo a try. I compared the CPU usage to the win10 file explorer, and they look identical (both are minuscule); it's super impressive.

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Re:File Pilot: A file explorer built for speed with a modern... by qingcharles on Friday February 21, 2025 @09:12PM (#43135403)

How is the support for CJK and insane Unicode like emoji surrogates? Dealing with some of those edge cases can break a man.

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Re:File Pilot: A file explorer built for speed with a modern... by qingcharles on Wednesday February 19, 2025 @02:52AM (#43099725)

Really impressive. Basically has everything from Windows 11 Explorer without being a bloated POS.

Only thing I'd love is to be able to go bigger on the preview thumbnails. It's limited itself to the Windows sizes.

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Re:File Pilot: A file explorer built for speed with a modern... by fakebizprez on Friday February 21, 2025 @02:43AM (#43125094)

This x100000000.

I am probably repeating your comment in my sleep, word for word.

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