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FileCabinet Overview

FileCabinet is a local-first desktop vault for digital artifacts you want to keep, find, verify, and recover later.

It is not meant to replace your normal folders. Think of it as a deliberate retention space for files that deserve more structure than "somewhere in Downloads" but do not fit neatly into one active project folder.

:::tip Good Candidates for FileCabinet Installers, disk images, catalog manifests, configuration files, cryptographic keys, screenshots, datasets, archives, torrents, generated assets, recovery documents, and research artifacts. :::

Who FileCabinet Is For​

FileCabinet is for operators who are willing to do a little more work up front so important files are easier to trust, find, and recover later.

It takes more intention than leaving a file in your standard directories. You may choose an intake mode, review metadata, add a reason, adjust tags, or mark trust and retention priority. The vault asks for a small amount of context while the artifact is still fresh so your future self is not left guessing.

The effort scales:

  1. Basic Retention: Renders files searchable by name, type, and source.
  2. Extracted Content: Indexes code, logs, and text inside files for keyword search.
  3. Structured Context: Adds human reasoning (why this matters, provenance, trust level).
  4. Archival Maturity: Computes multi-hash signatures (SHA-256, BLAKE3) to verify that the file remains unchanged years down the road.

The Core Concept​

FileCabinet stores important files inside a selected vault folder and keeps a catalog of what each file is, where it came from, how it was classified, what hashes identify it, and what searchable text was extracted from it.

The app is local-first. Vault files live on your machine, under the vault path you choose. The lightweight application catalog lives in your local AppData, and the vault itself contains portable subfolders for items, exports, quarantine, thumbnails, and extracted text.

K:\FileCabinet\          <-- Your Vault Path
  ├── items/             <-- Retained files sorted by yyyy/MM/
  ├── catalog/           <-- Vault-relative settings and logs
  ├── quarantine/        <-- Isolated files waiting for review
  ├── exports/           <-- Catalog backups and ZIP bundles
  ├── thumbnails/        <-- Cached local previews
  └── extracted-text/    <-- Raw text extracted from files

The Neon Ink Theme​

FileCabinet uses the Neon Ink dark theme. Rather than being decorative, the theme colors are semantic, designed to let you scan dense tables and immediately understand the status of your vault:

:::info Cyan & Teal (Structure) Used for navigation, selection, focus, structure, and metadata fields. :::

:::note Violet & Purple (Process) Used to identify ingest, preview, process, and active pipeline states. :::

:::success Green (Healthy & Verified) Identifies healthy, indexed, verified, and validated files. :::

:::warning Yellow & Orange (Attention / Large files) Identifies starred or attention-worthy items, as well as large binary objects, package-like installers, and build outputs. :::

:::danger Red (Quarantine & Danger) Identifies quarantined items, catalog validation failures, missing files, or destructive actions. :::