AutoTidy

Automatic file organisation for Windows. Point it at the folders that get messy — Downloads, Desktop, Screenshots — describe what should happen to what, and it keeps them tidy in the background.

autotidy.alpyalay.org

---

2.0 is a full rewrite in Rust

AutoTidy was a Python + PyQt6 app through 1.5.0. Version 2.0 rebuilds it on Rust and Tauri — a 1.8 MB installer instead of 73 MB, with recursive scanning and real-time folder watching that the old architecture couldn't support.

Upgrading is nothing to do. Your rules, settings and history are read in place from %APPDATA%\AutoTidy exactly as they are. The rewrite was verified against the old engine file-by-file — see Verification.

---

What it does

You define rules per folder. Each rule matches files by age, by name pattern, or both, and then does one thing with them:

Action	What happens
Move	Relocated into a dated archive folder, or anywhere you choose
Copy	Duplicated, original left alone
Delete to Recycle Bin	Recoverable through Windows
Delete permanently	Irreversible — the UI makes sure you know

Everything it does is written to a log you can browse, filter and undo.

Features

• Age and pattern matching — combined with AND or OR. Age 0 makes a rule name-only.
• Glob or regex patterns, with per-rule exclusions and a global never-touch-these-folders list.
• Preview matches before a rule ever runs.
• Dry-run mode — simulate everything, change nothing.
• Recursive scanning to a depth you choose. (new in 2.0)
• Watch mode — react as files appear instead of polling. (new in 2.0)
• Templated destinations: _Cleanup/{YYYY}-{MM}-{DD}, with {FILENAME}, {EXT} and {ORIGINAL_FOLDER_NAME} too.
• Full history and undo, grouped by scan run.
• Explorer right-click → "Add to AutoTidy". (now works without admin rights — see Fixed in 2.0)
• Lives in the system tray. Dark mode follows Windows.

---

Install

Download from autotidy.alpyalay.org or straight from Releases, and run it.

Windows 10 or 11. The installer is per-user — no administrator rights needed. WebView2 is already present on Windows 11 and current Windows 10; if it's missing the installer fetches it.

Upgrading from 1.x? The installer detects the old version and offers to remove it first. Take the offer — the two installers use different systems, so Windows won't replace it automatically, and leaving both installed means two copies of AutoTidy organising the same folders at once.

Code signing. Release binaries are not signed yet. An application to the SignPath Foundation's free programme for open-source projects is pending; the code signing policy below describes the arrangement it will put in place.

Until then SmartScreen will warn. Choose More info → Run anyway, verify the SHA-256 checksum published with the release, or build it yourself from source below.

---

How it compares to 1.5.0

Measured on the same machine, same workload:

	1.5.0	2.0.0
Installer	73 MB	1.8 MB	41× smaller
Executable	33.5 MB	4.9 MB	6.9× smaller
Launch	unpacked 33.5 MB to %TEMP% every time	runs directly	—
Right-click → Add folder	74 ms	21 ms	3.5× faster
Organising 8,000 files	7.4 s	0.6 s	12× faster
Scanning 20,000 files recursively	not supported	1.6 s	—

Honesty about that speed column: if you're tidying a Downloads folder with a few dozen files once an hour, you will not notice any of it. The old engine took about 13 ms for that. The size, the launch behaviour, and the two new scanning modes are the real differences.

Full numbers, methodology and the workload where the rewrite buys you nothing are in the 2.0.0 release notes. Reproduce them yourself with python tools/bench/benchmark.py --markdown.

Fixed in 2.0

Bugs found by diffing the new engine against the old one, all of which existed in 1.5.0:

• The Explorer context menu needed administrator rights and refused to install without them. It now uses the per-user registry hive.
• --add-folder could silently discard your other changes. It launched a second process that wrote config.json while the running app held a stale copy and overwrote it on quit.
• Renaming destination templates lost the rename. A destination of {FILENAME}_backup{EXT} filed the file under its original name.
• Undoing a whole run left no record, because only single-item undos were logged.
• Config writes weren't atomic, so an interrupted save could corrupt config.json.
• Undo now tells you up front when something can't be reversed, instead of asking you to confirm and then failing.

---

Configuration

Settings and rules live in %APPDATA%\AutoTidy\config.json; history in autotidy_history.jsonl beside it. Both are plain text and safe to read.

Archive template — _Cleanup/{YYYY}-{MM}-{DD} by default. Relative paths resolve inside the monitored folder. Available placeholders: {YYYY} {MM} {DD} {FILENAME} {EXT} {ORIGINAL_FOLDER_NAME}.

Exclusion patterns are checked before age and name, so an excluded file is never touched no matter what else matches:

Pattern	Effect
*.tmp	skip temp files
build/	skip a whole subfolder
~$*.docx	skip Office autosave files
^backup_\d{4}	regex, when the rule has regex enabled

On Windows, glob patterns are case-insensitive — *.pdf matches Report.PDF. This matches how 1.5.0 behaved. Regex patterns are case-sensitive.

---

Build from source

Needs Rust (stable), Node 20+, and the MSVC build tools.

npm install
npm run tauri dev      # run with hot-reloading UI
npm run tauri build    # produce target/release/bundle/nsis/

Layout

Path
crates/autotidy-core/	The engine — matching, actions, history, undo, scanning. No GUI dependencies.
crates/autotidy-cli/	Headless driver for the engine, used by the parity harness.
src-tauri/	Desktop shell: tray, window, IPC, Windows registry integration.
src/	React + TypeScript UI.
tools/parity/	Differential test harness against the 1.5.0 engine.
legacy/	The retired Python 1.5.0 engine. Not built, not shipped — here's why.

Keeping the engine free of GUI dependencies is deliberate: the same code is driven by the app, by the CLI, and by the test harness.

---

Verification

cargo test                          # 251 tests — the actual suite
python tools/parity/run_parity.py   # decisions, 12 rule variants
python tools/parity/wet_parity.py   # resulting files, 11 rule variants

The reference engine has its own 76 tests, which exist to guard the thing the parity harnesses measure against rather than to test shipping code:

cd legacy && pytest -q

Rewriting a program that deletes people's files is not something to do on confidence alone. So the old engine is kept as an executable specification, and both engines are run over a purpose-built corpus and their output compared.

The corpus targets the places a port silently breaks: files straddling every age boundary, unicode and spaces and glob metacharacters in names, mixed-case extensions, pre-seeded collisions in the destination, and files already sitting inside the archive folder.

Two harnesses, because one isn't enough. The dry-run harness compares the decisions each engine makes. But 1.5.0's collision handling lives inside if not dry_run:, so a dry run can never reach it — the second harness runs both engines for real over disposable copies and diffs the resulting file trees byte-for-byte.

That's how the case-sensitivity and template-rename bugs above were found.

---

Known limitations

• Windows only. The engine is cross-platform and its tests run on Linux in CI, but the tray, autostart and context-menu integration are Windows-specific.
• Not code-signed yet, so SmartScreen will warn on first run.
• Permanent deletion cannot be undone. Recycle Bin deletions are reversible only through Windows itself.
• Filename collisions get a counter (_1, _2), falling back to a timestamp after 100 attempts.

---

Privacy

AutoTidy collects nothing. There is no telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting, and no network access of any kind — the application never makes an outbound connection.

Everything it writes stays on your machine, under %APPDATA%\AutoTidy:

File	Contents
config.json	Your rules and settings
autotidy_history.jsonl	A record of every file action taken, so it can be undone
autotidy.log	Diagnostic log, rotated at 5 MB

These necessarily contain paths and filenames from the folders you asked AutoTidy to organise. They are never transmitted anywhere. Deleting the folder removes all of it.

The installer downloads the Microsoft WebView2 runtime from Microsoft if it isn't already present on the system. That is the only network activity associated with the project, it happens once at install time, and it is performed by Microsoft's own bootstrapper.

---

Code signing policy

Status: pending. An application to the SignPath Foundation is in progress. This policy describes the arrangement that will apply once it is approved, and is published here because the Foundation requires a project to have one. No release is signed yet — see Install.

Release binaries are signed by SignPath.io, with a free code signing certificate provided by the SignPath Foundation for open-source projects.

Because the certificate is issued in the SignPath Foundation's name, Windows shows SignPath Foundation as the publisher on signed AutoTidy binaries. That is expected and correct — it identifies who vouches for the signature, not who wrote the software.

Roles

AutoTidy is maintained by a single developer, who fills every role:

Role	Who	Responsibility
Author	@KhazP	Writes and commits the source
Reviewer	@KhazP	Reviews changes before they are merged to main
Approver	@KhazP	Approves each signing request before a release is signed

Every signing request is approved manually. Signing is never automatic.

What gets signed

Only binaries built by GitHub Actions from source in this repository, at a tagged commit. Nothing is signed from a developer machine, and no third-party binary is submitted for signing.

Data handling

AutoTidy collects no user data — see Privacy above.

---

Contributing

1. Fork, then branch: git checkout -b feat/my-improvement
2. Make your change, and keep cargo test, cargo clippy, cargo fmt --check and npm run typecheck clean
3. If you touch the engine, run both parity harnesses. They are the safety net for a program that moves and deletes files.
4. Open a pull request against main

---

Disclaimer

AutoTidy moves and deletes files according to rules you write. Try new rules against a folder you don't care about first, and use dry-run mode. The authors aren't liable for data loss.

License

MPL-2.0. The Rust and Tauri stack is MIT/Apache-2.0 throughout — unlike 1.5.0, which shipped GPL-v3 PyQt6 inside an MPL-2.0 project.

Citation metadata: CITATION.cff.