Updates

Added

• Ask your files. Type a question in the search box and press Ask your files. Direx Engine reads the best matching files and answers in a sentence or two, with links to the files it used. It runs on the local AI model on your own computer, so turn on Context in Settings to use it.
• Preview Word, Excel and PowerPoint files right in the app. Open a file's details and press Preview to read the document, see the spreadsheet as tables, or flip through each slide's text.
• Clicking a file now opens straight to what matters: its summary or a look at what is inside, a large preview, and the buttons to open it, with all the details below.
• Hover over any file name to see its full name, where it lives, its summary and a quick preview of what is inside, without opening it.
• Search results now show the sentence where your words were found inside each file, with the words in bold, so you can see why a file came up.
• Open a file from a search and its preview jumps straight to your words and highlights them, with arrows to step to the next match. Works for PDFs, Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, code, text and Markdown.
• Words inside pictures in Word, PowerPoint and Excel files, such as screenshots and scanned pages, are now searchable. This works offline after a one time download of about 3 MB.
• Read Markdown, code and text files right in the app. Markdown shows formatted, with tables, checklists and colored code blocks, or as plain source with one click. Code in any common language shows with colors and line numbers, and a Copy button copies the whole file.
• SolidWorks parts, assemblies and drawings now show their real thumbnail, and are searchable by material, author, custom properties such as part number and description, and feature names. No SolidWorks install needed.
• Reindex file, in any file's details, reads that one file again when you want its text, details or preview refreshed.
• The search box now cycles through examples of what you can search for, like a part number, a description, or "PDFs from last week".
• Windows on ARM now uses a native search engine for semantic search and gets video thumbnails and details, which were missing before.

Changed

• The app is about half the size. The Mac installer went from about 540 MB to about 300 MB and the Windows installer from about 680 MB to about 330 MB, with similar savings on Linux, by no longer packing in parts the app never used.
• Updates are much smaller. Most updates now download only what changed, usually a few megabytes instead of the whole app.
• Long documents are now searchable all the way through. Before, only about the first 20 pages of a long document could be found.
• Direx Engine now steps aside when your computer is busy. While another app is working the machine hard, such as a render, a build or a game, indexing pauses and picks up again once things calm down.
• The app does less work in the background: the file list no longer carries every document's full text each time it refreshes.
• Scanning large files is much faster, especially on a laptop running on battery. Big files such as disk images are checked with a quick fingerprint instead of being read in full on every scan.
• If you use more than one account on the same computer, only the signed in account's folders are watched and rescanned. When you sign back in, your folders catch up automatically.
• New folders are indexed first, ahead of routine refreshes, and pressing Refresh or Reindex several times no longer queues the same scan over and over.
• Files in OneDrive that are only in the cloud are listed by name, size and date without being downloaded, and get fully indexed once they are on your computer.
• Update notices now appear on top of the app instead of sometimes hiding behind the startup screen, and an update you chose to install later is no longer downloaded again.
• Security: sensitive build credentials are no longer included inside the app.

Fixed

• New Windows installs could index almost nothing. Folders stored in OneDrive and very large files in Downloads both stalled indexing. Both are fixed.
• PDF thumbnails show the first page again, including on Windows, where they had never worked.
• The duplicate finder refused to delete an older version of a file or a similar photo. They now delete normally, and the keep one copy rule works for similar photos and documents too.
• After deleting files, the file counts, duplicate suggestions and any open search now update right away.
• A scan interrupted by quitting the app now finishes on the next launch instead of showing as in progress forever.
• A copy of the app installed with an older installer, which can't update itself, now tells you so once and links to the download page, instead of silently never updating.

Added

• SSH/SFTP as a new remote storage source, alongside your existing local, NAS, OneDrive, and Google Drive connections.
• A Duplicates view that finds files that are identical or near-identical to each other, even across different storage sources.
• Star ratings and written reviews, right in the app - rate Direx Engine after you've used it a while, and your rating feeds the live average shown on the website.
• Code files are now indexed by their symbols and imports, not just filenames.
• Legacy Office, Stata, and SPSS file formats now preview correctly instead of showing as unsupported.
• A way to report a file type that isn't recognized, right from the file browser.
• Windows ARM64 support, alongside the existing Windows x64 build.
• Downvote button on community board posts, alongside the existing upvote, to show which suggestions are less helpful.

Changed

• Search results are smarter about understanding what you're asking for, especially natural-language queries like "the drawing from last week."
• Deleted files go to a trash/recycle bin instead of being permanently removed immediately, everywhere that's possible - an accidental delete is no longer unrecoverable.
• Symlinked and junctioned files and folders on Windows are now indexed properly instead of being silently skipped.
• The periodic background scan that catches file changes a live watcher might miss is now much lighter - it only re-reads a file's content when its size or modified date has actually changed, instead of every file, every time.
• SSH connections that stall mid-transfer now time out and retry instead of hanging indefinitely.
• Smart Search is now on by default, instead of needing to find the toggle in Settings first to discover it exists.
• Various under-the-hood security hardening.

Fixed

• Transient "Unauthorized" errors that briefly flashed when opening panels on app startup, including a deeper case where a cached session token kept getting reused after it had already expired. Panels now always fetch a fresh token before retrying, instead of silently reusing a stale one.

Changed

• Renamed from Hail Mary Engine to Direx Engine, across the app, the website, and the installer. We're now at direxengine.decursa.com - old hme.decursa.com links redirect there automatically.
• Each profession preset in Settings now shows its own icon, instead of every preset using the same engineering wrench icon.
• Clicking a file's thumbnail now opens the right preview - images, videos, audio, and PDFs, not just 3D CAD models.
• Indexing is noticeably faster, especially on non-Mac hardware - files are now batched into search instead of sent one at a time, and indexing work is capped to your CPU's core count instead of running unbounded.
• The app now starts up faster: the 3D CAD viewer's code only loads the first time you actually open a 3D preview, instead of on every launch.
• Large file lists are lighter on your connection - thumbnails for rows you haven't scrolled to yet no longer load until they're actually on screen.
• Indexing progress now shows a real progress bar instead of just a spinner.
• Dashboard stats (file counts by volume, by type, and how many files are ready to open here) now always show the true total across everything indexed, instead of sometimes only reflecting whatever happened to already be loaded on screen.
• Clicking a NAS or OneDrive source in the sidebar now reliably shows its files, even for a source with only a handful of files among tens of thousands from elsewhere.
• The "Files shown per page" setting (previously "per category") now applies consistently everywhere in the file browser, not just category tabs.
• Whichever file browser view you last used, List or Folders, is now remembered instead of resetting every time you open the app.

Fixed

• A file's detail view no longer shows a "Part number" that was just its filename repeated, for anything that isn't a CAD or engineering file.
• The account page no longer lists your Google-linked status or subscription tier under "data we've collected" - trimmed to what's actually meaningful there.
• The splash screen no longer holds the app open for up to 45 seconds while a full volume reindex finishes on launch. It now only waits for the backend to be healthy, and reindexing catches up in the background once the window is already showing.
• Connecting a very large folder with thousands of subfolders could freeze the whole app on startup. It's now handled safely, with live file change detection skipped only for folders that large; everything still gets indexed normally either way.
• Removing a storage location with a very large number of files could take an extremely long time because of a missing database index. Fixed.
• Sign in could silently stop working after the app had been open for a long time, with no obvious cause. The app now recovers automatically if that happens.

Added

• A Recent tab in the file browser, showing only files you touched in the last 7 days.
• Added a Smart Search feature that helps you find files more efficiently.

Changed

• The sign in screen now matches the landing page, with the same gradient background, glass card, and a plain explanation of what the app does and how it works.
• The Engineering and Creative presets in Settings now always keep Documents and Other files enabled, on top of whatever file types are specific to your profession.

Fixed

• Reindexing a OneDrive connection stayed stuck on the very first set of files forever. It now works as expected once you add files through the picker.

Added

• A first-run welcome tour for new users.
• OneDrive added as a cloud storage provider you can connect.
• Keyboard shortcuts: Cmd/Ctrl+K to search, arrow keys to move through results, Enter to open.
• A system log so you can see what Hail Mary Engine is doing in the background.
• A Creative preset (Photoshop, Illustrator, video editors) with its own sidebar group.
• A manual "Check for updates" button, and a setting to turn off silent auto-download of updates. With auto-download off, Hail Mary Engine now asks at launch whether to update instead of staying silent.
• A manual Local vs. NAS override per connected volume, for when the automatic guess gets it wrong.

Disabled

• Google Drive is off until Google's CASA app authorization is verified. We don't know how long that will take, so it will remain off in the meantime.

Changed

• Renamed from Project Hail Mary to Hail Mary Engine, throughout the app. This name change will take some time to fully propagate everywhere.
• The installed app is meaningfully smaller: about 12% smaller to download, and 59% smaller once installed.
• The beta watermark is gone. Check Settings for the current version instead.
• The sidebar now hides file-type categories you've disabled in Settings, instead of leaving a permanently empty entry.

Fixed

• The splash screen no longer blocks every window on launch, and now shows update progress.
• A rendering bug where the dot over a lowercase "i" would vanish at semibold text weight.
• The file list's subtitle now shows the containing folder instead of repeating the filename.

Fixed

• Google Drive's folder picker now opens reliably, so you can choose exactly which folders to index instead of it failing to load.
• Google Drive sign-in now always opens in your default browser instead of occasionally getting stuck inside the app window.
• A connection stability issue on our servers that could interrupt sign-in.

Changed

• Connecting Google Drive no longer indexes your entire Drive right away. Indexing now starts once you've picked folders in the picker, or pressed Reindex.