showit

Bring any Windows window to the foreground by searching its title — fast, coloured, interactive.

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Features

• Substring / wildcard / regex search — plain text, */? globs, or full regex with -r
• Vivid hex-colour output — each title gets its own colour from a configurable palette; the matched portion is highlighted
• Interactive REPL — after results appear, type a number to focus, [n]c to close, or any text to search again
• Config file — config.toml lets you set any colour in the palette, the index colour, match highlight, errors, success messages
• Single static binary — no runtime dependencies; ships as a native Windows .exe

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Installation

From crates.io

cargo install showit

From source

git clone https://github.com/cumulus13/showit
cd showit
cargo build --release
# binary at: target/release/showit.exe

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Usage

showit [OPTIONS] [PATTERN]

Argument / Flag	Description
PATTERN	Title to search (substring by default)
-r, --regex	Treat PATTERN as a regular expression
-l, --list	List all visible windows
--config-path	Print the path to the config file
--init-config	Write a default config file (won't overwrite)
-h, --help	Print help
-V, --version	Print version

Examples

# Substring match (case-insensitive)
showit firefox

# Wildcard — any window whose title starts with "Visual"
showit "Visual*"

# Regex — windows containing "term" or "bash"
showit -r "term|bash"

# List every visible window
showit --list

Interactive commands

After results are displayed:

Input	Effect
3	Bring window #3 to the front
2c	Close window #2 (sends WM_CLOSE)
notepad	Start a new search for "notepad"
x / q	Quit

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Configuration

Run showit --init-config to create a starter config, then open it:

showit --config-path   # prints the path

Windows: %APPDATA%\showit\config.toml
Linux/macOS: ~/.config/showit/config.toml

Example config.toml

# showit configuration file
# Colors must be valid hex strings: "#RRGGBB" or "#RGB"

# Palette cycled through for each window title in the list
colors = [
    "#00FFFF",   # Cyan
    "#FF6B6B",   # Coral red
    "#FFD700",   # Gold
    "#7CFC00",   # Lawn green
    "#FF69B4",   # Hot pink
    "#00CED1",   # Dark turquoise
    "#FFA500",   # Orange
    "#DA70D6",   # Orchid
    "#ADFF2F",   # Green-yellow
    "#1E90FF",   # Dodger blue
    "#FF4500",   # Orange-red
    "#98FB98",   # Pale green
]

# Color for the index numbers (e.g.  1.  2.  3.)
index_color   = "#888888"

# Color for the prompt line
prompt_color  = "#00BFFF"

# Color used to highlight the matched portion inside a title
match_color   = "#FFFF00"

# Color for error messages
error_color   = "#FF4444"

# Color for success messages (focused / closed confirmations)
success_color = "#44FF88"

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Architecture

src/
├── main.rs        — CLI args (clap), interactive REPL, command dispatch
├── config.rs      — Config struct, TOML load/write, hex-color parsing
├── display.rs     — Coloured output helpers (colorize, highlight_match, …)
├── search.rs      — Substring / wildcard / regex filtering
└── windows_api.rs — Win32 EnumWindows, SetForegroundWindow, PostMessage(WM_CLOSE)
                     (non-Windows stub for CI)

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Development

cargo build          # debug build (cross-compiles on Linux for testing)
cargo test           # 12 unit tests, all platform-safe
cargo clippy         # lints
cargo build --release --target x86_64-pc-windows-msvc   # final Windows binary

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License

MIT — see LICENSE.

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👤 Author

Hadi Cahyadi

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