🔎 Executable Quick Viewer

The least dramatic way to inspect dramatic binaries.

Read-only executable metadata preview for Nuclr Commander, built to make PE, ELF, and Mach-O files reveal their secrets without making you open a hex editor, fire up a disassembler, or pretend this needed to be harder than it is. ⚙️

🚀 Why This Exists

Because sometimes you do not want an entire reverse-engineering ceremony just to answer:

• 📦 What format is this thing?
• 🧠 Which architecture is it built for?
• 🧩 Is it a PE executable, a shared object, a DLL, a bundle?
• 🛡️ Does it expose the usual security flags?
• 🗂️ What sections or slices does it contain?

This plugin handles that fast, directly inside Nuclr Commander, with a level of restraint and competence that should frankly be more common.

✨ What It Does

Executable Quick Viewer is a focused quick-look plugin for executable metadata. It reads stable header information and presents it in a clean panel designed for glanceable inspection.

🧩 Supported Formats

Recognised extensions are exe, dll, sys, ocx, so, bin, run, appimage, dylib, mach, bundle, o and a. Files with no extension are sniffed by header magic instead, so extensionless Unix binaries preview correctly too.

📋 What You Get

• 📄 File summary: name, size, format, type, platform, architecture, bitness, endianness
• 🧠 Header details: machine / CPU type, subsystem, ABI, image base, entrypoint, interpreter, loader hints
• 🛡️ Common flags: ASLR, NX, PIE, dynamic linking, stripped hints where available
• 🧱 Structure view: PE sections, ELF sections, Mach-O sections, or fat-binary slices

In short: all the generally available facts you actually want, without the usual binary-analysis theater.

🚫 What It Very Deliberately Does Not Do

• ❌ Disassembly
• ❌ Decompilation
• ❌ Import / export browsing
• ❌ Signature verification
• ❌ Malware analysis
• ❌ Binary execution
• ❌ Wild guesswork dressed up as insight

🖼️ Screenshot

🖼️ Thumbnail

A header page: the format, file type, platform, architecture and bitness, the key header fields, then the section or entry table.

It implements the platform SDK 6.0.0 thumbnail methods, so plugins that want a picture of a file - attachment chips in AI Projects, for one - get it through Commander.

📥 Installation

Copy the signed plugin archive and detached signature into the Nuclr Commander plugins/ directory:

quick-view-executables-<version>.zip
quick-view-executables-<version>.zip.sig

Nuclr Commander verifies the RSA-SHA256 signature against nuclr-cert.pem on load. The plugin becomes available immediately without a restart.

🗂️ Source Layout

src/main/java/dev/nuclr/plugin/core/quick/viewer/
├── ExecutableQuickViewProvider.java   plugin entry point
├── ExecutableViewPanel.java           Swing UI renderer
└── exec/
    ├── ExecutableParser.java          PE / ELF / Mach-O header parsing
    ├── ExecutableFileInfo.java        parsed metadata model
    ├── ExecutableTableEntry.java      display row model
    └── ExecutableParseException.java  parse error

🧪 Tests

The repository includes parser-focused unit tests covering:

• 🪟 PE metadata extraction
• 🐧 ELF metadata extraction
• 🍎 Fat Mach-O parsing
• 🚨 Unsupported file handling

📚 Dependencies

All dependencies are provided by Nuclr Commander at runtime — nothing extra is bundled in the plugin ZIP.

📄 License

Apache License 2.0.