SpanFinder

Preview

More files open in the preview (#69). Nine file types already had syntax highlighting written for them but never reached the preview: .php, .jsx, .tsx, .hpp, .psm1, .vb, .fs, .fsx and .svg. They now open, highlighted. Nearly 80 more common code and config formats open as plain text — Ruby, Lua, Kotlin, Swift, Dart, Vue, Svelte, SCSS, Terraform, Protocol Buffers, GraphQL, .srt/.vtt subtitles, patches and more.

Files are recognized by what they contain, not only by extension. A file with no extension (Makefile, LICENSE) or with an extension SPAN does not know is checked by reading its first 4 KB; if that is text, it is shown as text. .dat, .bak, .tmp, .cache, .db and similar extensions that can hold either text or binary data are shown as text when they are text, and otherwise behave as before.

Only local files are read for this. Files on network shares and optical drives, cloud-only files and symbolic links are not opened to check them, so selecting one never waits on a server or starts a download.

Text in legacy encodings displays correctly. A file saved without a byte-order mark in a pre-Unicode encoding — Korean CP949, Simplified Chinese GBK, Japanese Shift-JIS — was decoded as UTF-8 and came out full of �. SPAN now checks whether the file is valid UTF-8 and, if not, reads it with the Windows code page for non-Unicode programs. Subtitles and logs from older tools are readable again. A file in a code page other than this PC's (a GBK file on a Korean system) still cannot be told apart.

Files another program is writing to can be previewed. An active log file showed an empty pane: the preview opened files in a mode that fails while another program has them open for writing.

Syntax highlighting

Highlighting can no longer freeze the window (#36). The one-second safety limit added for #36 never took effect in released builds: crash-reporting startup created a regular expression first, which fixed the limit at "none" before SPAN could set it. It is now set before anything else runs. A file with an unclosed /** … */ comment — where each additional line made the stall about four times longer — now falls back to plain text in about a second.

The background check that is meant to catch such files before highlighting starts looked only at the first match of each rule, so a closed comment at the top of the file (a license header) let the file through. It now checks every match.

Filter and search

Wildcard patterns with several * stay fast. A filter or search such as *a*b*c used a matcher whose cost rises steeply with each wildcard; a pathological pattern like *a*a*a*a*a*a*b took 770 ms on a single 60-character name. Those patterns now use a matcher that runs in linear time. Simpler patterns (*.txt, report*, a pasted file name) keep the matcher they had before.

Thumbnails

Clip Studio Paint thumbnails are more robust (#56). SPAN now goes straight to the embedded preview in a .clip file, using the location recorded in the file header, instead of walking every chunk to find it. One unreadable chunk along the way used to cost the whole thumbnail. The old walk remains as a fallback for files whose header is damaged.

Thumbnails

Photoshop files now show thumbnails. Photoshop does not install a thumbnail handler on Windows, so File Explorer cannot draw a .psd either — there is nothing for the shell to call. SPAN now reads the preview image Photoshop writes inside the file, so .psd thumbnails appear whether or not Photoshop is installed.

Only the file header and its resource block are read, so a 60 MB PSD costs no more than a small one. Checked against files saved by Photoshop CS6 through 2026, and against PSDs exported by Clip Studio Paint.

A failed preview no longer means no thumbnail. When SPAN cannot extract the embedded preview from a .clip or .psd, it now falls back to the Windows shell instead of stopping there. Before, a machine with a working codec installed still ended up with an empty icon.

Folders that looked empty

Folders carrying the system attribute were left out of listings. Naver MYBOX mounts a virtual drive whose top-level folders all carry that attribute, so the entire drive appeared empty (#68). Ordinary folders were affected too — C:\ProgramData\Microsoft and C:\Windows\Fonts among them.

The system attribute on a folder is not a request to hide it. It is what enables a custom icon and display name for that folder, and File Explorer always shows such folders. SPAN now follows the same rule: only the hidden attribute hides an item.

Present since v1.6.3.

Windows

New windows never appeared. Ctrl+N — and the taskbar Jump List's "New window" — created a window that had a taskbar button and keyboard focus but was never drawn. Clicking its taskbar entry only flashed. A new window is cloaked while it is being built so you never see the default WinUI size, and the code meant to reveal it afterwards could never run. Present since v1.2.13.0.

A new window also no longer lands exactly on top of the one you opened it from — it is offset, and sized to match.

"New window" in the taskbar Jump List. Right-click SPAN Finder on the taskbar and pick New window.

File watching

Two defects in how folder changes are handled. Both affected local folders, not just network shares.

• A watcher error could blank the listing you were looking at. .NET reports "events overflowed but the watcher is still alive" and "the watcher is dead" through the same event, and the two were not told apart. A change notification was also fired when re-creating the watcher had already failed — so a folder that had gone away could empty the view instead of leaving it alone.
• A failed reload was read as "the folder is empty", which collapsed the columns to its right and moved focus back to the parent. A single transient error lost your place.

Watcher re-creation is now capped per path, so a file server that does not support change notifications cannot spin.

Network shares still need F5. The reasoning is in #67.

Archives

SPAN Finder can now extract .7z, .rar, .tar, .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar.xz, .tgz, .gz, .bz2, .xz and .cab — right-click an archive and choose Extract Here or Extract To. Previously only .zip could be extracted. (#66)

You can also get files out of a ZIP without extracting the whole thing (#64):

• Copy an entry and paste it anywhere, including into File Explorer
• Drag an entry out of the archive column into another folder or another app
• Folders work too — dragging one out brings its whole subtree
• Preview now works for files inside a ZIP; selecting a text file used to show nothing

.zip extraction deliberately still uses the existing engine. It reports progress and responds to Cancel every 1 MB inside a file, isolates per-entry failures, and supports pause — none of which the new engine can match yet. Splitting them means new-format support cannot regress ZIP.

Double-clicking a non-ZIP archive no longer opens an empty column. Browsing inside an archive is still ZIP-only, and entering a .7z used to show an empty listing that read as "this archive is empty".

ZIP fixes

Three long-standing defects surfaced while testing the above:

• Korean filenames were mangled. Archives made by Bandizip or Windows Explorer store CP949 filenames without the Unicode flag. .NET decoded those as UTF-8, producing unrecoverable replacement characters. Entry names are now decoded per entry.
• Corrupted archives extracted silently. CRC32 was never verified, so a bit-rotted or partially-downloaded archive reported success. Corrupted entries are now detected and reported.
• Alternate data stream injection. An entry named installer.exe:Zone.Identifier passed the path-traversal check and was written as a hidden NTFS stream. Now rejected.

Network

Browsing a server root works. Typing \\server — or opening it from the sidebar — now lists the server's shares. Windows does not expose \\server as a directory, which is why \\server\share worked while \\server did not. Unreachable hosts fail in a few seconds with a retry option instead of hanging. (#67)

\\wsl.localhost opens inside SPAN. It used to launch Windows File Explorer even with SPAN set as the default file manager: when the address bar could not resolve a path it fell back to a shell execute, and UNC paths went there too. SPAN now lists your WSL distributions itself.

Network shares still do not refresh on their own; press F5. That needs the watcher's error handling reworked first, and is tracked separately.

Notes

SPAN Finder now bundles a native archive engine built from OtterZip.

• This build's otterzip_ffi.dll is built from OtterZip v1.2.3.0, commit 5cb9053374c5e88484b508af61bf16b3040ed7a1.
• The engine links UnRAR (© Alexander Roshal), used to extract RAR archives only. SPAN Finder never creates RAR archives. Because the UnRAR licence is not GPL-compatible, LICENSE.md now carries an explicit UnRAR Exception, following the approach 7-Zip uses. See LICENSE.md and OpenSourceLicenses.md.
• The archive engine is x64 only. Other architectures fall back to the previous ZIP-only behaviour.

Full changelog: https://github.com/LumiBearStudio/SpanFinder/compare/v1.8.0...v2.0.3