win-cleaner

A Windows desktop app that scans known application and system cache locations, shows how much space each one holds, and cleans the ones you select — always through the Recycle Bin.

Features

• Curated catalog of 80+ cleanup targets: browsers, chat apps, game launchers, developer tools, GPU shader caches, and Windows system caches.
• Category → app → item selection tree with per-item size estimates, search, and sorting.
• Preview (dry-run) mode is the default; nothing is deleted until you explicitly clean.
• Opt-in detection of empty top-level folders under AppData and ProgramData.
• Run history with per-run details and 7/30-day totals.
• Diagnostics log you can attach to bug reports.

Safety model

• Deletion only ever moves paths to the Recycle Bin (SHFileOperationW with FOF_ALLOWUNDO); the app never deletes permanently, and never falls back to permanent deletion on failure.
• Every path must be strictly inside one of the known safe roots (AppData Local/Roaming, ProgramData, the user profile, the Windows and Program Files trees). The guard is enforced when scanning and re-checked immediately before every delete; the roots themselves and paths reached through symlink/reparse-point ancestors are always rejected.
• Empty groups are never pre-selected, empty-folder removal is opt-in, and symlinks/reparse points are treated as content — never followed, never sized, never considered "empty".
• Cleaning writes a JSON record of exactly what was attempted to the run history.

Diagnostics

The app writes logs to %LOCALAPPDATA%\win-cleaner\logs\. If something fails, attach the latest log file to your issue. Run history lives in %LOCALAPPDATA%\win-cleaner\stats\.

Development

Portable logic (catalog, scanning, planning, execution strategy, statistics) builds and tests on Linux:

cargo fmt --all -- --check
cargo test --workspace
cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets -- -D warnings

Build the Windows 10/11 x86-64 application from Linux with cargo-xwin:

cargo xwin build --workspace --release --target x86_64-pc-windows-msvc

Create the portable executable, checksum, and ZIP under dist/:

bash scripts/package-windows.sh

The packaging script requires cargo-xwin, zip, and GNU sha256sum; it verifies both the generated checksum and ZIP before returning success.

The GUI runs on Linux for development, but scanning and cleaning are Windows-only.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md. Please report security-sensitive issues according to SECURITY.md.

License

Licensed under the MIT License. Bundled assets keep their own licenses: Inter (SIL OFL 1.1) and Phosphor icons (MIT).