README.md

nahual

nahual (Nahuatl: companion spirit). Everyday "open-with" viewers, in Rust, on Llimphi.

nahual is the set of viewers a desktop user expects — a file shell that dispatches the right viewer by content, plus viewers for text, images, audio, video, SVG, maps, fonts, hex, tables, markdown, archives and more. All render on the same GPU-accelerated Llimphi UI. A meta-runtime lets you define a new viewer from a JSON schema, with no Rust.

<img src="docs/nahual_showreel.gif" alt="nahual showreel — a Dopus-style file manager: folder tree, session tabs, icon grid with real thumbnails, and browse-and-preview with a content-dispatched viewer" width="900"> a file manager with real thumbnails + browse-and-preview, the viewer dispatched by content

Run

cargo run --release -p nahual-shell-llimphi          # the open-with shell (dispatches by content)
cargo run --release -p nahual-file-explorer-llimphi  # file tree
cargo run --release -p nahual-image-viewer-llimphi   # image viewer
cargo run --release -p nahual-text-viewer-llimphi    # text viewer

Viewers

text · image (PNG/JPEG/WebP) · audio · video · svg · map (geo) · font (TTF/OTF glyph outlines) · hex · table · markdown · archive (zip/tar) · card · gallery · tree — plus nahual-viewer-core / nahual-source-core / nahual-thumb-core and the meta-runtime + meta-schema libraries.

How dependencies work

This is a clean front-door repo: it contains only nahual's own crates. Everything else is pulled as a git dependency —

the Llimphi UI framework → llimphi.git
foundational crates (content discern, media decoders, content-addressed sources, shared leaves) → the tawasuyu monorepo, the suite's source of truth.

No vendoring, no duplication. First build clones those repos (cached afterwards).

Considerations

Viewers, not editors. To edit text use nada; to edit an image use pineal.
The media viewers decode AV1/Opus/FLAC/MP3/Vorbis/WebM natively (pure-Rust, no ffmpeg).
Cross-platform Llimphi UI (Linux/macOS/Windows); viewers also compile inside the Wawa kernel.

License

MIT. Builds on Llimphi and the tawasuyu suite.