Pinkbin: a Tauri disk cleaner that reads the NTFS MFT, explains folders with AI, and deletes by scope

What Pinkbin does, in three steps

Pinkbin is an open source disk cleaner for Windows that does three things, in order: scan the whole disk fast, explain what an unfamiliar folder is, then delete by scope rather than by folder. The README states the promise in one line and then qualifies it in the next: it never reads your file contents, everything it sends to a model is directory metadata, and deletions go to the system Recycle Bin by default so they are recoverable. The audience is someone with a full C: drive who does not know which of the big folders are safe to remove. It is not a duplicate finder and not a system tuner; it is a scanner with an explainer and a guarded delete button.

Why the scan is fast, and the jwalk fallback

Speed comes from reading the filesystem the way the fast Windows tools do. On Windows, Pinkbin reads the NTFS Master File Table directly, through the ntfs crate, and the README claims a full scan of C: in two to five seconds. On other platforms it falls back to jwalk, a parallel cross-platform directory walker, which is slower but portable. The result is rendered two ways at once: a coloured treemap and a tree view with 22px rows, each carrying a usage percentage bar, so the shape of the problem is visible before you read a single path. The scanner also skips the recycle bin and system volume metadata directories, a fix listed in the release notes, so progress is not dragged down by NTFS internals.

The AI column and the metadata-only rule

The middle column is where the AI goes, and the privacy rule is explicit. You drag a folder from the tree into the chat and get an explanation of what it is, whether it can be deleted, and what you would lose by deleting it. It is bring-your-own-key: you supply an Anthropic, OpenAI or Gemini key, or you run Ollama locally and pay nothing. What leaves your machine is metadata only, which the README enumerates as the path name, the size, the file count, the extension distribution and at most 20 sample paths. No file contents are read. Data stays local too, in ~/.pinkbin/, holding an undo log and an optional quarantine directory.

Scaffolds, 22 WeChat scopes, and the 36 that were cut

Known applications get something better than an explanation: a cleanup script, which is one TOML file plus one Rust integration test, surfaced as a card you can act on per scope. There are two today. The WeChat PC script covers both 3.x and 4.x layouts with 22 scopes, clearing caches, received media and chat backups while never touching the chat database, favourites, moments or CustomEmotion. The Conda script recycles stale environments as whole directories, using a conda-meta/history modified time older than 90 days, with the base environment greyed out and unselectable. The README also explains why 36 earlier scaffolds were deleted: nobody had verified their glob boundaries, and the old node-modules pattern matched the copies inside Cursor, VS Code and games, which is a deletion you cannot undo by accident and then shrug at.

Platforms, SmartScreen and building it yourself

Prebuilt binaries are Windows only, and the first run comes with a warning you need to expect.

git clone https://github.com/cccyd2003-qwq/pinkbin.git && cd pinkbin
pnpm install
cargo test --workspace

That is the build path, needed because the release notes state plainly that macOS has no signing certificate yet and Linux has not been verified on a real machine, so only Windows 10 and 11 x64 downloads exist, as NSIS or MSI, with a portable build alongside. SmartScreen will block the first launch since the project is unsigned, and the documented response is to click More info then Run anyway, with SHA256 values published per file so you can verify what you downloaded against Get-FileHash. Reading the NTFS MFT needs administrator rights, and the installer carries a manifest so it raises UAC. The build needs Node 20 or newer, pnpm 9 or newer, stable Rust, and on Windows the VS Build Tools 2022 and WebView2. Once running, the flow is: pick a disk or folder, scan, then either drag a strange folder into the chat or use a scaffold card.

Deletion safety, and the undo button that is missing

Deletion is guarded in three layers, and the project is honest that one of them is not finished. Every deletion goes to the system Recycle Bin by default, so the operating system already gives you a way back. Every operation is appended to ~/.pinkbin/undo.jsonl. There is an optional seven-day quarantine. What is missing is the obvious affordance: the roadmap still lists a one-click undo button as not done, so today recovery means the Recycle Bin or reading the log. The README also draws a line the user is meant to respect: only the WeChat and Conda scaffolds are safe to run automatically, everything else is yours to clean by hand, and its stated principle is that it would rather leave a thousand gigabytes in place than delete one file by mistake.

WizTree, SpaceSniffer and CleanMyWechat

The credits section is the best comparison available, because the project names its own ancestors. WizTree is cited for the NTFS MFT direct-read approach and as the speed benchmark, and if raw scan speed on Windows is all you need, that is the tool to beat. SpaceSniffer is cited as the treemap pioneer. CleanMyWechat is cited as the model for the WeChat cleanup script, and it does that one job. Pinkbin's argument is that it is the combination: a fast scan, an explanation for the folders you do not recognise, and per-scope cleanup with safety tests in CI, all open source under MIT and all with your own model key. What it does not yet have is the breadth of the older tools, since only two scaffolds exist and the rest of the roadmap is unchecked.

Licence, stack and upkeep

Pinkbin is MIT licensed, with the README explicitly welcoming forks, commercial use and closed-source derivatives, and adding one condition in spirit: if you change a scaffold, change its safety test, because the red-line assertions are what prevent a user's data being deleted. The stack is React 18 and TypeScript on Tauri 2 with react-markdown in front, and a Rust workspace of crates behind it: scanner, scaffold, executor, advisor, scaffold-lint and a Steam inspector, using the ntfs, jwalk, rayon, globset and trash crates. The last push was on 2026-07-14 and the current release is v0.1.2 from 2026-05-06, which added a Steam library inspector, a progress-bearing cleanup button, and a fix for portable builds that embedded scaffold TOML files into the binary so the Studio panel is never empty.

Editorial conclusion

Use Pinkbin if you have a full Windows drive and the blocker is not knowing what the big folders are, because the fast MFT scan and the metadata-only AI explanation are aimed exactly at that. Do not use it as a general cleaner yet, since only the WeChat and Conda scaffolds are tested for automatic deletion and the project's own rule is to clean everything else by hand. Build from source rather than trusting a download if you can, since the project is unsigned, SmartScreen will block the first run, and the release notes publish SHA256 values and a cross-device test checklist rather than asking you to take the installer on trust.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. cccyd2003-qwq/pinkbin on GitHub
2. License: MIT
3. Project website
4. README
5. Releases