Oriel 0.1.0

The first public build. Unzip and run oriel.exe — no installer, and nothing is registered until you ask for it.

Read this before running the shim

The archive contains two separable things.

oriel.exe is the file manager. It registers nothing, touches no system state, and is a standard-user process with no elevation path. Running it is as consequential as running any other program.

oriel_dialog.dll is an in-process COM server that, once registered, is loaded into other applications whenever they ask the shell for an Open or Save dialog. It is not registered by unzipping it, and not registered by running oriel.exe. shim-control.ps1 is what registers it, and you should read that script before running it.

This build's shim forwards everything to the genuine dialog and adds nothing of its own — the interception has to be proven harmless before any of Oriel's UI goes near it. Four rules the implementation exists to enforce:

1. It writes the per-user registration only. The machine registration is deliberately left alone, and is read at runtime to find the real implementation.
2. It never hardcodes where the real dialog lives.
3. Any failure on our side ends in the real dialog, never in no dialog. An application that cannot save a file is a far worse outcome than one showing a plain dialog.
4. It links the static CRT and depends on nothing beyond the OS, because it lands inside processes that already chose their own runtime.

shim_test.exe is included so you can check that yourself: it loads the DLL directly and exercises 31 cases across both dialog classes without touching the registry.

Not signed

None of these binaries are code-signed. SmartScreen will warn, and an unsigned DLL turning up inside a signed application is exactly what security tooling is built to object to — that objection is correct and you should weigh it. Signing is wired into the build and waits only on a certificate. The source is here to read, and CI builds both architectures on every push.

English and Japanese

The interface follows your Windows display language. general.lang in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Oriel\settings.tsv pins it: 0 auto, 1 Japanese, 2 English.

What works

Column navigation with per-column selection and scroll state, grid and list views over the same model, off-thread enumeration that discards results for folders you have already left, thumbnails, the hosted system context menu, file associations, rename and the other actions, tags, and persisted settings — all drawn by the application on a DirectComposition surface, per-monitor-v2 DPI aware.

Status

Early, and versioned accordingly. The dialog shim does not yet answer with Oriel's own picker. There is no installer. Treat behaviour as provisional.