About

These are Windows programs I build for my own work and keep open. They serve different ends — documents, video, audio, disks, recognition, keeping the machine itself in order — yet they are built alike, and that is no coincidence.

A program lives in its own folder

Portability here is not a convenience but a property. A program sits in its folder and runs from there: it writes nothing to the registry, scatters no files across the system and needs no installer. Deleting the folder removes it without a trace, and copying that folder moves it to another machine.

Everything else follows. Settings travel with the program instead of being assembled again on every machine. Updating does not argue with the system: the parts inside the folder update one by one and never demand a reinstall of the whole.

Ten megabytes unfold into a suite

The code itself is a few megabytes. What makes a product heavy is not its lines but what it brings along: runtimes, codecs, models, engines. So a build is a deployment — the code fetches and assembles its environment from a manifest. Ten megabytes of source grow into gigabytes of suite, and every part of it updates apart from the rest.

The window stands on a tested foundation

The value of these programs is not the convenient window. Under every interface lies a foundation of command-line tools, tested many times over and working on its own. The window is a way to use it, not what holds it up: every operation can be called from the command line, and sometimes that is the only sensible route — in a script, on a remote machine, with nobody at the screen.

Hence the shared look. The interfaces resemble one another not for the sake of beauty: the same machinery sits behind them, and it shows what is happening, what it rests on and what comes next.

Installers are about updating, not installing

Setup kits for familiar programs repeat hundreds of others — if you only look at the first run. The point is elsewhere: they update portable versions, which usually have nobody to update them, and install the ordinary ones the way you need rather than the way a wizard offers.

Audion TC

A particular pride. A file manager that becomes a system inside the system: it replaces Windows settings, installs and updates programs without leaving the file panes. No Scoop or similar managers, which travel poorly to another machine — here everything moves with the folder.

None of this is for sale and none of it urges you to anything. It works for me; it may serve you. Open source under Apache 2.0.