sifty

Sifty is an open-source maintenance tool for Windows, positioned as "sifting the junk out of what you want to keep." It emphasizes being hard to misuse: preview every change, delete only to the Recycle Bin, and undo any cleanup. It offers both a scriptable CLI and a full-screen terminal UI (TUI).

Purpose and Positioning Sifty is used for Windows system maintenance, cleaning up junk and caches, analyzing disk usage, finding duplicate files, and managing apps, startup items, and updates. It also targets clutter common on developer machines: scattered node_modules and build outputs, orphaned git worktrees, and bloated WSL2 disks.

Main Capabilities Junk cleanup categories when running sifty junk scan or sifty junk clean, the engine cleans up the following categories extracted directly from junk_categories(). Always-enabled categories include:

• user-temp: per-user temporary files (%TEMP% or %TMP%).
• thumbnail-cache: Explorer thumbnail and icon caches (automatically rebuilt).
• browser-cache: disk caches for Chrome, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, and Firefox profiles (never involves cookies, history, or passwords).
• winget-cache: temporary installation files downloaded by WinGet.
• onedrive-logs: OneDrive sync diagnostic logs (automatically rebuilt).
• discord-cache: disk caches for Discord, PTB, and Canary channels (never involves login session data).
• crash-dumps: per-user crash dumps and error reports (CrashDumps, WER).
• windows-temp (requires administrator privileges): system-wide temporary files (C:\Windows\Temp).
• windows-update-cache (requires administrator privileges): downloaded update packages left over from Windows Update.
• event-log-archives (requires administrator privileges): old Windows event log archives (Archive-*.evtx). Active logs are unaffected.
• defender-history (requires administrator privlimited): Windows Defender scan detection history logs.
• system-crash-reports (requires administrator privileges): system-wide crash reports and kernel minidumps (WER, Minidump). Categories that are off by default and need to be enabled via configuration include:
• downloads-installers: installer files in the Downloads folder (.exe / .msi). Can be enabled via sifty config set junk.include_downloads_installers true.
• windows-old (requires administrator privileges): remnants of the previous Windows installation after a feature update (C:\Windows.old). Can be enabled via sifty config set junk.include_windows_old true.

Usage CLI: scriptable execution of cleanup and inspection commands. If you do not want to install Python, you can download the standalone sifty.exe from the latest release. TUI: sifty tui opens a full-screen application with a seven-section sidebar (Home, Clean, Disk, Apps, Monitor, Reports, AI).

• Home: a volume capacity dashboard and a Run checkup button that can scan everything at once; discovered issues come with in-place fix buttons (clean junk, clean expired downloads, update apps, each with confirmation).
• Clean: Junk / Purge / Optimize / Smart cleanup are grouped under a single entry point (tabs).
• Apps: installed / updates / startup / services, with fuzzy filtering, sorting, batch uninstall, and an automatic leftover scan after uninstall.
• AI: agentic chat, where proposed tool runs display inline Run/Skip buttons in the conversation, and scan results come with follow-up action buttons. Conversations persist across restarts, and Sifty learns which categories you often clean and which actions you reject, so its suggestions better fit your actual usage habits. Shortcuts: Ctrl+P opens the command palette (jump to any screen), F2 elevates privileges, Space marks rows for batch operations. The Reports screen shows space reclaimed over time and has an Undo last clean button.

AI settings (configurableSelection)

1. Install Ollama and start it.
2. Pull the configured model: ollama pull qwen2.5:3b.
3. sifty ai status should report "running". The optional AI assistant runs locally through Ollama: data never leaves your machine, and it only sees file metadata (name, size, path), never touches file contents. The AI never deletes anything, it only provides suggestions; high-risk tool calls always require your approval.

Safety mechanisms Because Sifty deletes files and changes system state, it is designed to be difficult to misuse:

• Dry-run by default: every destructive command previews what it will do; actual changes require an explicit --apply.
• Trash only, never permanent deletion: all deletions go through a trash() function backed by Send2Trash, and sifty undo can restore the last cleanup.
• Protected paths: C:\Windows, Program Files, ProgramData, drive roots, and profile roots are rejected even under --apply --yes.
• Audit log: every deletion that is actually executed is recorded in %APPDATA%\sifty\audit.log.

Use cases Suitable for Windows desktop users and developers for routine system maintenance, disk space reclamation, duplicate file finding, app and startup item management, update management, and developer environment cleanup.

Limitations and requirements

• Windows platform only.
• Some operations (Windows temp files, update caches, certain uninstalls) require an administrator terminal. sifty doctor will indicate whether you have elevated privileges, and sifty --admin <cmd> will relaunch with elevation via UAC.
• AI features are optional and require a local Ollama installation with the model pulled.
• Configuration is located at %APPDATA%\sifty\config.toml; sifty config set only writes the keys you change, so defaults still take effect on upgrade.

Architecture A layered design is used: the thin frontend depends on core; core depends on windows / infra; reverse imports are not allowed. The GUI can also call the same set of engine functions (junk.scan, disk.find_duplicates, checkup.run_checkup) without rewriting. The design rationale is in docs/ARCHITECTURE.md. The safety guardrails are the most thoroughly tested code in the repository; the Windows environment is mocked, so the test suite can also run on CI.

License MIT © Amine Zouaoui