What is "Read First"?

"Read First" is a simple Windows tool. It adds a new menu when you right-click any file in Explorer, called "Read first...".

When you use it, two choices show up:

• Line: Shows you just the first line of the file.
• Megabyte: Shows you up to the first 1 megabyte (MB) of the file.

When you click one of those, a window pops up with the content. You can read and copy the text, but not change it.

Binary placeholder behavior

The renderer displays bytes as:

• Printable ASCII (0x20 to 0x7E) as characters.
• New lines and tabs as normal whitespace.
• Other bytes (including 0x00) as placeholders like <00>, <1F>, <FF>.

Install

Download the release zip, extract it, then run from PowerShell in the extracted folder:

.\install.ps1

This will:

1. Copy the bundled read-first.exe to %LOCALAPPDATA%\FirstReadMenu.
2. Register context menu entries under HKCU:\Software\Classes\*\shell.

No administrator rights are required. The installer does not require the Rust toolchain.

Build

For local development:

cargo build --release

Uninstall

.\uninstall.ps1

This removes:

• The two context menu entries.
• %LOCALAPPDATA%\FirstReadMenu\read-first.exe and optional sidecar files (if present).