Changelog

First Windows release, and everything since. Full feature parity with Aliasr for macOS (the same rule engine, the same undo and crash-recovery guarantees), with the safety engine rebuilt around how Windows and NTFS actually treat file names, plus 13 languages, Windows High Contrast, and self-update, all in the current beta build.

The rules

• Drop files or a whole folder; live Current → New preview with diff-highlighted changes, per-rule live examples, and inline hand-editing of any single name (Enter or F2).
• Seven stackable rules: Find & Replace (plain or regex), Insert Text, Remove (a range or a pattern), Change Case, Number / Template with {n} {name} {ext} {date} {parent} tokens (per-folder numbering restart), Clean Up (whitespace, accents, safe characters, or a Windows-safe mode), and Extension (lowercase / normalize / change).
• {date} reads EXIF DateTimeOriginal from JPEG/TIFF with a small pure-Python reader (no OS imaging framework needed) or falls back to the file's modified or created date.
• Include-subfolders renames a whole tree in place, folder by folder; folders themselves are never renamed.
• Save and reload rule stacks as presets.

Safety

• NTFS-correct conflict detection: case-insensitive, the way NTFS actually compares names, but unlike the Mac build's APFS-safe check it does not fold Unicode normalization or ß→ss, so café (NFC vs NFD) and straße.txt / STRASSE.txt are correctly kept as distinct legal files. Apply refuses to run while any collision exists, and every colliding row says exactly what it collides with.
• Windows name validation, in plain English: reserved device names (CON, PRN, AUX, NUL, COM0-9, LPT0-9, even with an extension), the illegal characters < > : " / \ | ? *, control characters, and names ending in a space or a dot are caught in the preview with the reason shown inline.
• Locked-file awareness: a file open in another app fails its rename gracefully. Aliasr names the exact file, and the whole batch rolls back to its original state.
• Long-path support: renames route through \\?\-prefixed paths past the old 260-character MAX_PATH limit.
• Two-phase renames through temporary names: swaps, chains, and case-only renames (FILE.txt → file.txt) never lose a file.
• Undo every batch (Ctrl Z) with an on-disk undo log, plus a write-ahead crash journal that recovers interrupted batches on the next launch.

Windows fit & finish

• Per-user install into %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Aliasr: no UAC prompt, no admin rights.
• Adopted the shared twoplus11 design system: WCAG-derived accent, consistent corner radii across every card, button, input, menu and dialog, and a canonical footer action group.
• The title bar follows the app's light/dark setting: choosing Dark inside Aliasr no longer leaves a white caption bar.
• Segoe UI Variable throughout. The inherited Apple font families are gone.
• No horizontal scrolling at 150% Windows text scaling.
• Self-update in place, the job Sparkle does on the Mac build. Aliasr downloads the new installer, verifies its Authenticode signature and that its version matches what was advertised, installs over itself and reopens. It correctly checks against the Windows update feed rather than the macOS one. Any check that fails deletes the download and sends you to the download page instead.

Language & accessibility

• 13 languages: English, Español, Français, Deutsch, Italiano, Português (Brasil), Nederlands, Polski, Русский, Türkçe, 日本語, 简体中文, 한국어. Aliasr follows your Windows display language order by default; the header's language button switches it live. Counted messages use each language's real plural rules, and the rename tokens stay verbatim in every locale, so a translated UI never changes what a template does.
• Windows High Contrast support: the app honours the high-contrast themes instead of overriding them with its own palette.
• Every field in the rule builder is named by its visible label for screen readers, rather than by its internal key.
• Designed waiting and failure states for the preview: a large batch that's still being worked out says so instead of showing an empty pane, and a preview that fails offers a Try again button.
• WCAG 2.1 AA, axe-audited, across a 266-case test suite covering the engine, the Windows filesystem layer, the pywebview bridge, i18n, and static accessibility.

Known in this beta

• SmartScreen may still warn on first download despite the signature; reputation builds per file. See the install notes.
• No screen-reader pass with Narrator or NVDA has been done by a human yet. The accessibility work is tested structurally and audited with axe-core, but assistive technology has not driven the app end to end. If you use one, that feedback is the most valuable thing you could send.