live

Printy

Watches folders and prints what lands in them — a scan, an export, a label. One printer and one set of settings per folder, configured once. Waits until a file has finished being written, never prints the same thing twice, and treats a printer that is switched off as a pause rather than a failure.

What it is

A scanner drops PDFs into a folder. An ERP export writes delivery notes. A label generator produces one file per parcel. And then somebody opens each file, picks the printer, hits print, and closes it again — all day.

The cost only becomes visible once you add it up: a minute of clicking per document, several times an hour — and it stops entirely the moment that person is in a meeting, on holiday, or simply not at that desk.

Yet the rule behind the clicking is almost always trivial: everything that lands in this folder goes to that printer, two copies, double-sided. Printy is a place to write that rule down once.

Highlights

One folder, one rule — printer, copies, duplex, colour, file types, check interval, and what happens to the file afterwards. Each watched folder carries its own settings and does not interfere with the others.
Waits until the file is finished — a file still being written is left alone until it stops changing. A half-transferred scan would otherwise come out as half a page.
Never prints the same thing twice — Printy recognises a file it has already handled by its content, not merely by its name.
A printer that is off is not a failure — the queue holds instead of failing job after job. Nothing is lost, no retry is consumed, and printing resumes on its own once the printer is back. A genuinely broken file gives up after three attempts, on its own, and lets the queue carry on.
Nothing is deleted by accident — a printed file moves to a subfolder, stays where it is, or is deleted, as you choose. A file that could not be printed is never deleted — not even in a folder set to delete. That is precisely the file you still need.
No surprises when setting up — whatever is already in a folder when you add it counts as done. Only new arrivals are printed, unless you explicitly ask otherwise. Two hundred old scans should not mean two hundred pages.
Runs in the background — tray icon, start with the computer, start minimised, one global pause. Notifications for everything, for failures only, or not at all.
A history you can act on — every job with its folder, printer, time and outcome, filtered down to failures if you want, and each one reprintable — with the settings it was originally printed with.
Your data stays here — no account, no sync, no telemetry. Everything lives in a single file on the machine. File contents are read in order to print them and not stored.

Tech stack

Rust with Tauri 2 for the core: folder watching, queue, and the printing path
React 19, TypeScript, and a purpose-built interface in German
SQLite for folders, settings and history — one file, no server
On Windows each page is rasterised and placed by Printy itself; on macOS the system print service does it

Availability

Windows is the target platform; macOS is supported as well. One difference is documented rather than hidden: with fit-to-page turned off, Windows shrinks oversized content while macOS crops it — the print service there has no “shrink but never enlarge” mode.

Install

On Windows, take the installer from the latest release — either the .exe or the .msi. A portable variant is published alongside them for machines where nothing may be installed.

On macOS:

brew tap NoiXdev/tap
brew install --cask printy

macOS builds are signed and notarized.

Status

Printy is LIVE (v1.0.0). Issues and PRs are welcome — github.com/NoiXdev/printy.