Will this move files inside my actual project repos?

Only the folders you point it at. The recipes here watch Downloads (and, for some, its subfolders) — not your working repos. You choose the monitored folders, and you can see every match in the simulation before anything happens.

Is it safe to run the secrets recipes on real credentials?

Yes. They only move and tag files into a review folder on the same PC — nothing is read for content, uploaded or sent anywhere. The goal is to get keys and .env files out of the folder where they’re easiest to leak, and put them where you’ll deal with them.

What happens to a `.env` I actually still need?

It’s moved, not deleted, into _Secrets (review) — in plain sight, sorted to the top. You look, and you decide whether to keep it, store it properly, or discard it. And “Undo” reverses the run if you’d rather it stayed put.

Does it compress logs into 7z or RAR?

It creates ZIP. The “Archive old server logs” recipe zips each old log beside the original. If you receive 7z or RAR archives, the app extracts those too — including password-protected ones — and Windows 11 (23H2 and later) can extract them natively as well.

Do my files get uploaded anywhere?

No. Every match, move, rename and zip happens locally — 100% on your PC. No account, no cloud, nothing sent. Available now on the Microsoft Store.

Organize developer downloads: SDKs, repos, builds

Open a developer’s Downloads folder and you can read their whole month in it. An SDK installer from three laptops ago. A project-final.zip someone sent on Slack. Two database dumps you meant to restore and forgot. A .env with real credentials sitting in plain sight. Loose scripts, a stray config.json, crash dumps weighing hundreds of megabytes each, and a graveyard of .log files from a debugging session last spring. You know exactly where everything should go. You just never have the ten minutes, so it never happens.

Elegant File Explorer does the filing for you, with rules you write once and forget — and every bit of it runs on your own machine, nothing uploaded. The Developer and DevOps & Data packs turn that chaos into folders you can actually navigate.

Get the loose code out of the way#

Start with the everyday clutter: the scripts, configs and snippets you download and never move. The recipe “Gather loose code and configs” recognizes code and configuration files loose in your Downloads and moves them into a Code subfolder, pulling that stray .py and lost .json out from between your installers.

If you like to see how a rule is built before you trust one, here is that same idea as a rule you can read at a glance:

Open Auto-organization and click + New rule.
Rule name: Loose code.
Monitored folders: + Add folder, Browse…, pick your Downloads folder.
Which files (conditions): with the tab set to Any (OR), add an “Extension is” condition for each format you want — .py, .js, .ts, .sql, .json.
What to do (actions): “Move to” → a Downloads\Code folder.

Click “Simulate effect” for the Preview — nothing is actually changed, then “Save rule”. Or skip the whole thing and pick the recipe from the Recipe Gallery, which fills the rule in for you.

The heavyweights that quietly eat your disk#

Two kinds of files bloat a developer’s drive without you ever noticing: crash dumps and old logs. Both are handled.

“Crash dumps and minidumps to review” looks through your Downloads and its subfolders for the memory dumps and crash reports left behind after debugging — .dmp files, minidumps, crash logs — and moves them into a _Crashes (review) folder, tagged Crash. A single dump can run hundreds of megabytes, and nobody remembers they are there.
“Clean old logs and temp files” finds .log, .tmp, .temp and .cache files that haven’t changed in more than 14 days and gathers them into _Review temp, tagged Temp. It only touches what’s gone cold, so nothing in active use is disturbed.

For servers, “Archive old server logs” takes a different tack: it finds .log files untouched for more than a week and compresses each one into a ZIP right beside the original, tagged Log. You reclaim the space without losing the history — the log is still there, just zipped.

Notebooks and datasets, filed by themselves#

If your work drifts into data, two recipes keep that side tidy. “Jupyter notebooks gathered” rounds up the .ipynb files scattered through Downloads and collects them in Documents\Projects\Notebooks, tagged Notebook — every analysis, experiment and course notebook in one place instead of orphaned across the disk.

“Datasets and data exports” recognizes heavy data exports — .csv, .parquet, .jsonl and .ndjson files larger than 10 MB — and files them into Data\Exports by year and month, tagged Dataset. The little day-to-day CSVs stay out of it; only the real datasets get archived, so the folder means something.

And “Database dumps” sweeps the .sql, .dump and .bson backups into Documents\DevOps\Dumps by month, tagged DB dump — your database backups filed where they belong, well away from the code.

The files that should never sit loose#

Here is the one that matters most. A private key or a .env full of secrets does not belong in a folder you screen-share, drag into a zip, or sync to who-knows-where. Two recipes make those files visible and move them somewhere deliberate.

“Isolate .env files (secrets)” finds .env files, credential files and anything named like a secret across Downloads and its subfolders, and moves them into _Secrets (review), tagged Secret. It lowers the odds of a password or key shipping out with a project by accident.
“Isolate keys and digital certificates” does the same for private keys and certificates — .pem, .key, .pfx, .p12, .cer, .crt and id_rsa — gathering them into _Keys and certificates (review), also tagged Secret. An SSH key or a signing certificate has no business living in Downloads; here you actually see them and put them away properly.

These recipes move and tag. They don’t upload, scan or phone home — the whole point is that your secrets stay on your machine and simply stop sitting where you’ll leak them.

Where did that installer come from?#

One signal developers quietly need and almost never get: Windows records where each download came from — the site behind it — and almost no program surfaces it. Elegant File Explorer does. When you pull an SDK, a signed installer or a release binary off the web, that origin travels with the file. If you’ve ever stared at a setup.exe wondering whether it came from the official site or some mirror, being able to see exactly where a file came from is worth a look — it’s the provenance you needed when a build behaves strangely.

Nothing is deleted, everything can be previewed#

Automating a folder full of work makes anyone nervous, and it should. Two things answer that. “Simulate effect” shows the full outcome — every move, every rename, every zip — before a single file changes. And every run is logged, so “Undo” reverses it: moving is moving, never deleting. The .env isolation, the log cleanup, the dump sweep — you can watch each one in the preview first, then reverse it if it wasn’t what you wanted. Notice too that the log-archive recipe creates a plain ZIP beside your file; the app makes ZIPs, and it can also open and extract 7z and RAR archives you receive, including password-protected ones.

The folder names with an underscore — _Crashes (review), _Secrets (review) — are deliberate. They sort to the top and read as a to-do: look at these, then decide. The app gathers; you make the call.