GitHub - cristeigabriela/wintheon: A Rust library for building program launchers for Windows.

1 min read Original article ↗
wintheon

Library to discover, rank and inspect launchable Windows file entries.

Walks multiple sources, such as Desktop, Start Menu, and the Microsoft Store WindowsApps folder — or any source you provide — yielding typed entries with resolved target paths, shell icons, full file-version information metadata, and query-time relevance scoring.

crates.io · docs.rs
Example launcher — Spotlight-style search bar built on the public API (cargo run --example launcher)

wintheon launcher example

Wintheon APIs used: Gatherer with all three built-in sources at distinct priorities · WeightedEntryIteratorExt::sorted_by_score re-ranking every keystroke (per-entry MatchIndex cache) · FileEntry::icon + FileIcon::extract_icon_at for 64×64 RGBA · FileEntry::version_info for company / version / copyright badges · FileEntry::link_path for shell-correct launch targets.

Layered on top:

  • Global Shift+Alt+Space hotkey via global-hotkey
  • Frameless, always-on-top viewport
  • Compact ↔ expanded resize on first keystroke (top edge stays put)
  • Spotlight positioning anchored 120 px below screen top, horizontally centered
  • ↑ / ↓ / Enter / Escape navigation, auto-focused search
  • Color-coded origin chips, theme-aware card backgrounds
  • On-disk RGBA cache under %TEMP% with mtime-header self-invalidation, mmap-backed reads (mmap-io)
  • Background prewarm thread fills the cache at startup
  • Lazy, visibility-gated texture upload at render time