Introduction
Falcon is a rebuild of the Eagle asset manager in Rust, written to learn how Eagle works.
Each chapter in the first part describes one piece of Eagle. It covers what Eagle does, with every claim marked observed or inferred, and then how falcon implements it.
- Observed claims come from Eagle’s own files: a real library on disk, or REA analysis of
app.asar. - Inferred claims are conclusions drawn from those files that haven’t been checked directly.
Falcon is written from that behaviour. It doesn’t copy Eagle’s code.
The second part, The desktop app, describes falcon’s desktop app: its window, viewers, keys, preferences, themes and how it opens and saves libraries.
Status
Falcon is early alpha and unsigned. PARITY.md compares it with Eagle 4.0.0 feature by feature, checked against falcon’s code. Of Eagle’s 912 features outside the online set, 905 are done and 7 are accepted differences; none is partly done or missing. That is about 99% done. Another 32 need an online service, an account or Eagle’s plugin system and are counted separately. ROADMAP.md lists what is left and what comes later.
Falcon handles exactly Eagle’s set of file formats. FORMATS.md lists each one and its status. Falcon has no plugin system: Actions and Export in Format are built into the app, and PLUGINS.md lists the plugins Eagle provides that falcon could build later.
Working today
- Import with thumbnails and colour palettes, folders with their structure, paste, drag and drop, and screen capture.
- Folders, tags with a tag picker, smart folders, Quick Access, ratings, notes, undo and batch editing.
- Keyword, filter and colour search, with marquee selection in four layouts.
- Viewers for images at full resolution, video (with an FFmpeg fallback that includes AV1), audio, fonts, a text editor, PDFs with their reader tools, interactive 3D models with textures, normal, bump and emissive maps and transparency, full IFC through web-ifc, PSD and AI at full resolution, and live web pages and MHTML.
- Preferences panes, the interface in eight languages (machine-written, waiting for a native read), sound effects, Actions, and Export in Format.
- The local HTTP API and the command-line tool.
Not there yet
- Some File ▸ New templates, normal and bump maps on 3D models, and a check on screen of some newer features (see ROADMAP.md).
- Eagle’s plugins.
- Signed releases, and the parts of the app that need macOS on Windows and Linux (see Windows).
Running the docs
scripts/docs.sh
This builds the API docs with cargo doc and serves the book at http://localhost:3000, reloading on changes.
Workspace
| Crate | Purpose |
|---|---|
falcon-library | Reading and writing .library folders: import, thumbnails, palettes, metadata, editing, search, smart folders, duplicates, undo, backups and .eaglepack files |
falcon-server | Eagle’s local HTTP API |
falcon-app | The desktop app, built with egui |
falcon-video | Probing, decoding and playing video through AVFoundation, falling back to falcon-ffmpeg |
falcon-ffmpeg | The fallback video decoder and player over an LGPL FFmpeg opened at run time (see Video playback) |
falcon-pdf | PDF pages, text, search and selection through PDFKit |
falcon | Command-line tool: new, import, folder, info, backup, export, import-pack, serve |
Build a launchable Falcon.app with scripts/bundle.sh.