pack2text

Copy an entire directory's code and text to the clipboard in one click — or save it as a single, readable, byte-exact reversible .txt.

pack2text puts any directory — or a multi-selected set of files — into your clipboard as one readable text bundle: the fastest way to hand a whole codebase to an AI. The same bundle can also be written as a single .txt container you can read, diff, attach, or archive — and unpack restores every file byte-for-byte, including original encoding, BOM, and paths.

• Features
• Quick Start
• Why
• Usage
• Multi-select Naming
• Container Format
• Exclude Rules
• Building
• Known Limits
• Related

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Features

• Copy directory to clipboard — right-click a folder (or multi-select files), hit "Pack to Clipboard", paste straight into any AI chat. No file created, nothing to manage.
• Explorer / Finder context menu — right-click directories or files (multi-select supported):
  • Windows: registry entries under HKCU, no admin rights
  • macOS: Automator Quick Actions (~/Library/Services/*.workflow)
  • Pack to Clipboard — the whole selection becomes clipboard text (primary)
  • Pack to Text — optionally writes <selection>.txt into the current Explorer folder, auto-renaming (name (1).txt) when the target exists — never overwrites
• Byte-exact roundtrip — every file's original encoding, BOM, and SHA-256 are recorded in the container; unpack re-encodes and verifies every byte, so you get the originals back exactly or a loud, specific error.
• Multi-encoding detection — UTF-8, UTF-16 LE/BE (BOM), GB18030, Shift_JIS, EUC-KR, EUC-JP, Windows-1252. Binary or undetectable content is skipped with a warning — never silently corrupted.
• .ignore rules — gitignore-style, loaded recursively per-directory and scoped to the directory that declares them (with ! re-inclusion). Sensible built-in defaults for build dirs, lock files, archives, and binaries.
• Glob filters — repeatable --include / --exclude with full ** semantics (a/**/b, a/**, **/*.rs).
• Safe by design — path traversal, duplicate paths, reserved Windows names, over-long components, and overwriting existing files are rejected before anything is written; extraction is all-or-nothing with rollback on any write failure.
• Human-readable format — a multipart text file you can read, diff, and hand-edit; parsing accepts case-insensitive headers and quoted or unquoted filenames.
• Single binary — no runtime, no installer, no external files. Transactional --install-menu / --uninstall-menu (per-user, no admin rights).
• Error visibility — when launched from Explorer there is no console; errors surface in a message box instead of vanishing.

Quick Start

Windows

# 1. Install the context menu (run once)
pack2text.exe --install-menu

# 2. In Explorer, right-click a folder (or select several files) →
#    "Pack to Clipboard" → paste into your AI chat. Done.

Want the bundle as a file instead? Pick Pack to Text: it writes SelectionName.txt into the folder you are viewing, auto-renaming (SelectionName (1).txt) on repeat — existing files are never touched.

macOS

Not tested on a real Mac. The Quick Action bundles are cross-compile-verified and structurally validated, but the Finder integration itself has not been exercised on macOS hardware. Expect to be the first to run it.

# 1. Install the Finder Quick Actions (run once)
pack2text --install-menu

# 2. In Finder, right-click a folder (or select several files) →
#    Quick Actions → Pack to Clipboard / Pack to Text

If the actions don't appear immediately, enable them in System Settings → Extensions → Finder → Quick Actions (or run killall Finder once). Remove with pack2text --uninstall-menu.

Why

AI assistants read pasted text natively, but they can't read an entire project in one shot — you either paste files one by one or zip them, which most chat UIs can't read at all. For humans, a codebase that lives in plain text can be diffed, grepped, and pasted anywhere.

pack2text converts any selection — a whole directory, or a few files picked across folders — into one readable text bundle that goes straight to your clipboard: no file, no intermediate step, just select → copy → paste. Every file becomes a marked section with its relative path in the header, ready for the AI to read, search, and reason about your project as a whole. The same bundle can optionally be saved as a .txt container — readable, diffable, attachable — and unpack restores the originals byte-for-byte, original encoding, BOM, and directory layout included.

Usage

Usage: pack2text [OPTIONS] [DIRECTORIES]...

Arguments:
  [DIRECTORIES]...  Directories or files to pack

Options:
  -o, --output <OUTPUT>        Output file path
  -c, --clipboard              Output to clipboard instead of file
  -f, --force                  Overwrite existing output file
      --menu                   Context-menu mode (shared parent root, auto-rename)
      --menu-dir <MENU_DIR>    Context-menu current directory (Explorer %V)
      --unpack <UNPACK>        Unpack container file to directory
      --unpack-dir <UNPACK_DIR>  Output directory for --unpack (default: unpacked)
      --install-menu           Install Explorer/Finder context menu entries
      --uninstall-menu         Uninstall Explorer/Finder context menu entries
      --include <INCLUDE>      Include files matching glob (repeatable, any match wins)
      --exclude <EXCLUDE>      Exclude files matching glob (repeatable, any match wins)
  -v, --verbose                Verbose output

Examples

# Pack a project into a container, then verify by unpacking
pack2text C:\src\myproject -o myproject.txt
pack2text --unpack myproject.txt --unpack-dir restored
# → "extracted 12 files to restored" — byte-identical to the source

# Only Rust and Python sources, from several folders at once
pack2text a b --include "*.rs" --include "*.py"

# No file — straight to the clipboard
pack2text C:\src\myproject --clipboard

Multi-select Naming

Selection	Container name	Location
Single directory foo	foo.txt	next to foo (or current Explorer folder)
Multiple items	<parent folder name>.txt	current Explorer folder
Any (CLI -o)	your choice	your choice

Container Format

A multipart text file — readable by eye, strict by machine:

--=pack2text_a1b2c3d4e5f60718293a4b5c6d7e8f9=--
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="file"; filename="src/main.rs"
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
X-Original-Charset: utf-8
X-Original-BOM: none
X-Original-Size: 246
X-Original-SHA256: 9f86d081884c7d659a2feaa0c55ad015a3bf4f1b2b0b822cd15d6c15b0f00a08
X-Content-Length: 246

fn main() { ... }
--=pack2text_a1b2c3d4e5f60718293a4b5c6d7e8f9=--

• Header names are case-insensitive; filename= accepts quoted or unquoted values (hand-edited containers parse cleanly)
• Bodies are delimited by declared length, so container text inside a file cannot break parsing
• Unpack refuses on: path traversal, duplicate paths, size or SHA-256 mismatch, unknown charset/BOM, existing files, non-portable paths (control chars, "<>|?*, reserved device names like con.txt, colon components, >255-char components)

Exclude Rules

Create a .ignore file (gitignore syntax) — rules are loaded recursively and scoped to the directory that declares them:

# .ignore
*.log
!important.log   # re-include this one
build/           # ignore the whole build dir
secret-*.txt

If no .ignore exists, defaults apply: dotfiles, node_modules, target, dist, build, lock files, archives, and binary formats are excluded.

Building

Requires Rust (edition 2024):

# Windows exe (GNU toolchain)
cargo build --release --target x86_64-pc-windows-gnu

# macOS
cargo build --release --target x86_64-apple-darwin

# Linux (CLI works everywhere; context menu is Windows/macOS-only)
cargo build --release

cargo test        # 100+ unit & property tests
cargo clippy --all-targets -- -D warnings

Known Limits

• Encoding ambiguity is inherent: a GBK byte sequence that happens to be valid UTF-8 is detected as UTF-8. Round-trips stay byte-exact in every case; the displayed text may differ from intent in ambiguous cases.
• Binary and undetectable content is skipped with a warning — this is a text-packing tool.
• macOS integration is not tested on a real Mac. The Quick Action bundles are cross-compile-verified (cargo check --target x86_64-apple-darwin) and the generated plists validate with plistlib, but no macOS hardware has run them. Treat the Finder menu as experimental until verified.
• Context-menu integration, clipboard, and message boxes are verified by cross-compilation and registration inspection; a final sanity pass on real Windows/macOS desktops is recommended after first install.

Related

Prefer a PDF with embedded images, or a DOCX? Same idea, different containers:

• pack2pdf — pack a project into one page-numbered PDF with embedded images and CJK support
• docpack — pack a project into one DOCX with a GUI and i18n

License

MIT — see LICENSE.