Vesper

Fast, offline media browsing for Linux.

• Zero-config organization: Your folder structure is the tagging system.
• Blazingly fast: Virtualized grid smoothly handles 50,000+ files without stutter.
• Read-only by design: Browses your existing files; never edits, moves, or deletes them.
• Keyboard-driven: Navigate your entire media collection without touching a mouse.

Features

• Unified visual grid for images and videos across multiple source directories.
• Real-time filtering by folder-derived tags and fast text search.
• Native, borderless media viewer with zoom, pan, and looping video playback.
• Additive selection and multi-selection with persistent session state.
• Gracefully ignores .git, node_modules, and respects local .galleryignore files.
• Polished Linux desktop integration built on GTK4 and Libadwaita.

Install

Runtime Dependencies

Vesper requires ffmpeg and ffprobe to be installed on your system for video playback support and thumbnail generation:

• Ubuntu/Debian:

  sudo apt install ffmpeg

• Fedora:

  sudo dnf install ffmpeg

• Arch Linux:

  sudo pacman -S ffmpeg

Binary Release

Ubuntu / Debian / Mint: Download the .deb package from the Releases page and install it:

sudo apt install ./vesper_*.deb

This native package handles all desktop integration and system caches automatically.

Other Distributions (Tarball): Download the vesper-linux-x86_64.tar.gz and install it using the provided Makefile:

tar -xzf vesper-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
cd vesper-linux-x86_64
sudo make install

Build from Source

Ensure you have Rust and Cargo installed, along with GTK4 and SQLite dependencies.

# Fedora
sudo dnf install gtk4-devel libadwaita-devel pkg-config sqlite-devel

# Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt install libgtk-4-dev libadwaita-1-dev pkg-config libsqlite3-dev

git clone https://github.com/TheRealShek/vesper.git
cd vesper
cargo run --release

Development Setup

When developing Vesper, please ensure you configure the pre-commit hooks to run linters automatically. We provide a make target to set this up:

make setup

This configures Git to use the shared hooks in the .githooks/ directory, running cargo clippy and cargo fmt prior to commits.

Usage

1. Open Vesper for the first time.
2. Click Add Source Directory and select a folder containing your media.
3. Vesper instantly begins indexing in the background. Your folder names become your tags.
4. Use the sidebar to filter by tags, or the top bar to search and sort.
5. Single-click any image or video to open the native viewer.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
Tab / Shift+Tab	Move focus between UI regions
Arrow keys	Navigate grid or change file in viewer
Enter	Open selected cell in viewer
Escape	Close viewer, exit selection, or clear search
Ctrl+A	Select all in current view
Ctrl+Click / Shift+Click	Add cell to selection / Range select
F	Toggle fullscreen (in viewer)
I	Toggle info panel (in viewer)
Space	Toggle video play/pause (in viewer)

Architecture / Tech Stack

• Language: Rust
• UI Framework: GTK4 + Libadwaita (via gtk4-rs and libadwaita-rs)
• Database: SQLite (via rusqlite) for fast metadata querying and persistence.
• Concurrency: tokio for non-blocking I/O, database queries, and thumbnail generation.
• Filesystem: notify for real-time filesystem watching.

Status / Roadmap

Status: v1 Locked.

Vesper v1 is focused exclusively on creating a smooth, read-only browsing experience. There are no plans to introduce file editing, cloud sync, rating systems, or facial recognition. The application is feature-complete according to its primary scope.