Sally

Sally is a fast, keyboard-first dual-panel file manager for Windows power users. It keeps the classic Open Salamander workflow alive and moves it forward for current machines: Unicode and long paths, dark mode, native ARM64, modern viewing, active plugin packaging, Wine compatibility, maintained language packs, and a real release pipeline.

Download: latest release | Star: help Sally get discovered | Support: PayPal or Buy Me a Coffee

Why Sally

Open Salamander became loved because it made serious file work feel direct: two panels, fast keyboard commands, rich viewers, archive handling, plugins, and a compact Win32 UI that stays out of the way. Sally preserves that muscle memory while removing the places where the original codebase was showing its age.

• Built for real file names: Unicode and Windows long paths work through copy, move, delete, rename, drag/drop, panel state, directory history, Find, viewers, editors, startup paths, and network/UNC navigation.
• Classic workflow, current polish: the dense dual-panel interface remains, now with Light, Dark, and System theme modes across the core UI and first-party plugins.
• Small project, fast movement: user reports have turned into fixes for ARM64 FTP, Unicode context menus, viewer edge cases, Windows 11 automation changes, network long paths, release packaging, and language packs.
• Open and actively shipped: runtime zips, symbols, translator workspaces, and x64/x86/ARM64 builds are published through GitHub Releases.
• AI-assisted development velocity: AI helps grind through modernization work, tests, translations, and release plumbing while the project stays open source and user-driven.

Feature Highlights

File Operations That Respect Modern Paths

Sally's biggest modernization effort is path correctness. A file manager is only trustworthy if it acts on the exact file you selected, even when that name is long, non-ASCII, on a network share, or outside the active Windows code page.

• Unicode filenames and Windows long paths up to 32,767 characters.
• Wide-path handling across copy, move, delete, rename, create directory, quick rename, F4 edit, Alt+F3 external view, drag/drop, shell paste, directory history, and panel refresh.
• Safer Find result actions: loaded result files are validated, re-statted, and guarded against lossy ANSI fallbacks before destructive or shell-backed operations.
• Long UNC and WSL-style network paths are handled in more viewer and file-operation paths.
• Non-ASCII install paths work for startup, language loading, config.reg, and crash reporter launch.
• Cancellable network/UNC path checks prevent unreachable saved paths from hanging startup.
• Ongoing hardening covers ADS streams, reparse points, recursive delete prompts, same-volume moves, and Unicode worker error reporting.

Fast Find And Safer Results

Find is not just a dialog; it is part of the file-operation surface.

• Save and load Find results.
• Preserve Unicode Look in roots in saved presets.
• Filter results by all items, files, or folders.
• Keep full Unicode status paths internally before display ellipsizing.
• Refuse unsafe ANSI-backed actions when a Unicode row cannot round-trip cleanly.

Dark Mode That Keeps The Classic UI

Sally adds early dark-mode support without turning the app into a different product.

• Configure it under Options > Configuration... > Appearance > Theme > Mode.
• Choose Light, Dark, or System to follow the Windows app theme.
• Windows High Contrast remains authoritative and disables custom dark painting.
• Recent releases polished common dialogs, Find controls, About, size results, file panels, and bundled plugin surfaces.

Modern Viewing

The viewer stack has moved away from legacy Internet Explorer-era assumptions.

• WebView2-based Web Viewer replaces the old IE WebBrowser control.
• Markdown renders with images and GitHub-style CSS support.
• Web Viewer can handle HTML, Markdown, XML, SVG, PNG, and related preview workflows.
• BOM-marked UTF-8, UTF-16LE, and UTF-16BE text files open decoded in Auto/Text mode while Hex mode still shows raw bytes.
• Viewer fixes cover final-line navigation, decoded row clipping, Unicode windows, prompt ownership, and WebView2 process cleanup.

Bundled Plugins

Current Sally builds package a broad first-party plugin set instead of leaving users to assemble the basics.

• Archive and package tools: 7-Zip, ZIP, TAR, UnRAR, UnISO, UnARJ, UnCAB, UnCHM, UnLHA, UnMIME, UnOLE2, PAK, Split & Combine.
• File and system tools: FTP Client, File Comparator, Checksum, DiskMap, Registry Editor, Renamer, PE Viewer, Database Viewer, Network, Portable Devices, Windows Mobile.
• Viewer and automation tools: Web Viewer, Multimedia Viewer, Automation, Check Version.
• Plugin packaging now generates plugins.ver, resolves side-by-side plugin dependencies from plugin DLL directories, and auto-discovers newly shipped plugins for existing users.
• Legacy Altap Salamander 4.0 plugins are loaded only after user consent.

Platforms, Releases, And Compatibility

Sally is not a one-off binary drop. The release machinery is part of the product.

• Runtime zips for x64, x86, and ARM64, including Windows on ARM.
• Separate debug-symbol zips for crash dump investigation.
• Translator workspace artifacts for localization contributors.
• GitHub release updater over HTTPS through the Check Version plugin.
• Wine compatibility work makes Sally run under Wine 10.0 by avoiding hard dependency on imageres.dll and falling back to shell32.dll resources where needed.
• Modern CMake build covers Sally, bundled plugins, trace server, translator, shell extension, helper tools, language files, and release population.
• Clang-CL/xwin toolchains support Windows x64 and ARM64 cross-compilation with the MSVC ABI.

Localization Is Alive

Sally ships 10 maintained UI languages across supported release packages:

Chinese (Simplified), Czech, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, and Spanish.

The localization pipeline includes committed .slt archives, generated Translator workspaces, headless validation/export support, and release artifacts that make translation work possible without hidden legacy assets.

Downloads

Pre-built binaries are available on the Releases page.

• Pick Sally-<version>-x64.zip for most modern Intel/AMD Windows systems.
• Pick Sally-<version>-ARM64.zip for native Windows on ARM.
• Pick Sally-<version>-x86.zip for 32-bit systems.
• Download Sally-<version>-pdb.zip only if you need symbols for debugging.
• Download Sally-<version>-translator-workspace.zip if you want to help with language packs.

Support Sally

If Sally saves you time, please star the repository. Stars matter for discovery, especially for a small Windows desktop project that is doing a lot of unglamorous modernization work.

Financial support helps pay for the AI-assisted development workflow and keeps more time and tokens flowing into Sally:

• Support via PayPal
• Support via Buy Me a Coffee

Bug reports, focused testing, translation help, and careful feature requests are also valuable. Sally has moved fastest when users reported exact workflows and came back to verify the fix.

Building

Prerequisites

• Visual Studio 2022 with the Desktop development with C++ workload
• Windows 11 SDK (10.0.26100 or newer)

Build Commands

# Configure and build (x64 default)
cmake -S . -B build
cmake --build build --config RelWithDebInfo

# Populate output directory
cmake --build build --config RelWithDebInfo --target populate

Output: build/out/sally/<Config>_<Arch>/

When you run Sally from build/out, rebuild and repopulate that exact configuration first. For example, use cmake --build build --config Release --target populate before launching build/out/sally/Release_x64/ so plugin DLLs and .slg language files stay in sync.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. See the Developer Guide for repository structure, build targets, and internals.

If you want to help with UI translations and language packs, see the Localization Guide.

Good issue reports include the Sally version, architecture, exact path or filename shape when relevant, steps to reproduce, and whether the bug happens with the latest release.

About

Sally is an independent fork of Open Salamander, maintained by Elias Bachaalany. The original Open Salamander authors are not responsible for this project and do not provide support for it. Development is AI-assisted using Claude Code. See Origin for the full project history.

License

Sally is based on Open Salamander, open source software licensed under GPLv2. Individual components and libraries have separate but compatible licenses; see third_party.txt for details.

Resources

Altap Website | Features | Documentation | Community Forum | Upstream Repository | Wikipedia