BitCrafts Vigil

Spot every file change, find every duplicate, catch every tampered byte.

GTK4 + libadwaita desktop frontend for bit-crafts. Vigil brings three offline file tools together in one window:

• Hashing — snapshot a folder, then verify later exactly what was added, removed, or modified against that baseline, file by file.
• Duplicate detection — find duplicate files across your folders and see how much space they waste.
• Integrity verification — detect tampering and corruption by checking files against a saved manifest, down to content, metadata, and permissions.

No daemon, no cloud, no telemetry.

Features

• Three tools, one window — hashing, duplicate detection, and file integrity verification, each with its own run history.
• Friendly algorithm picker — choose by intent (Secure, Standard, Fast) instead of jargon, from blake3, sha256, xxh3, xxh128.
• Automatic threading — Vigil detects whether a folder lives on an SSD, hard disk, or network share and picks the fastest read mode, with a manual override per target.
• Track folders over time as named targets, with a sidebar listing everything you've registered.
• Queue runs through a job queue page that surfaces in-flight, pending, and completed runs.
• Browse per-folder history of every run, with relative timestamps and per-run duration + file count.
• Compare any two snapshots side-by-side — added / removed / modified files in a single pane, with hash before → after.
• Inspect duplicate groups and integrity changes with severity badges (added / removed / content / metadata) and reveal-in-files.
• Export the findings as a self-contained ZIP bundle (manifest + diff NDJSON + per-target preferences).
• English + French shipped. Drop-in de.po or es.po for new locales.

Screenshots

Watch a folder	History view
Pick a folder, choose the algorithm, snapshot.	Every snapshot you took, with timestamps and run duration.

Verify diff detail
Exact file-by-file diff: added (2), removed (4), modified (1) with the hash before → after.

Tracked folders	New watch
Sidebar of every folder Vigil is tracking.	Register a new folder as a tracked watch.

Runs view	Job queue
Every run executed for a given watch.	Pending, in-flight, and completed runs.

Per-watch history
Full audit trail per tracked folder.

Install

Download bitcrafts-vigil_<version>_amd64.deb from the GitHub Releases page (x86-v3 for any Haswell-or-later CPU, x86-v4 only if your CPU supports AVX-512), then:

sudo apt install ./bitcrafts-vigil_<version>_amd64.deb

Releases are GPG-signed; verify via SHA256SUMS.asc and GPG-KEY-bitcrafts.asc shipped alongside each release.

Or build from source per the root CONTRIBUTING.md.

The .deb installs Vigil under /usr/bin/vigil and its Python modules under /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/vigil/. It declares bitcrafts-tools as a dependency, so apt pulls in the matching CLI package automatically (which provides /usr/bin/bchash, /usr/bin/bcduplicate, /usr/bin/bcintegrity, statically linked — no runtime need for liburing, libblake3, libxxhash). Direct filesystem access (no sandbox) so io_uring and the multi-threaded worker pool run at full speed.

Override the binary lookup with BITCRAFTS_TOOLS_DIR=/custom/bin vigil for development or out-of-tree builds.

Architecture

applications/vigil/
├── src/vigil/
│   ├── backend/   # SQLite, XDG paths, argv contracts, parsers
│   ├── ui/        # GTK4 widgets, Blueprint templates, runners
│   ├── resources/ # vigil.gresource.xml + .blp source
│   └── _i18n.py   # gettext binding (domain: bitcrafts-vigil)
├── data/          # AppStream metainfo, .desktop, hicolor icons
├── packaging/
│   └── debian/    # control.in, postinst/postrm/prerm, copyright
└── po/            # bitcrafts-vigil.pot + fr.po

Vigil never links against the C libraries directly. It launches bchash via Gio.Subprocess with explicit argv and parses the JSONL output. This is a deliberate isolation: the GUI never crashes if a C tool segfaults, and the same backend code can be reused by any other frontend.

Runtime data

User state lives at $XDG_DATA_HOME/bitcrafts-vigil/ (default ~/.local/share/bitcrafts-vigil/). The .deb install reads and writes the real path directly — no sandbox redirection.

The CLI tools come from the bitcrafts-tools package and live at /usr/bin/. Override the lookup with BITCRAFTS_TOOLS_DIR=/custom/bin for development or out-of-tree builds.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later. Vigil is part of the bit-crafts toolkit.