Stl-thumb is a fast lightweight thumbnail generator for STL files. It can show previews for STL files in your file manager on Linux and Windows. It is written in Rust and uses OpenGL.

Stl-thumb requires 64 bit Windows 7 or later. Download the installer .exe for the latest release and run it.

The installer will tell the Windows shell to refresh the thumbnail cache, however this does not always seem to work. If your icons do not change then try using the Disk Cleanup utility to clear the thumbnail cache.

Stl-thumb works with Gnome and most other similar desktop environements. If you are using the KDE desktop environment then you will also need to install the seperate stl-thumb-kde package.

Make sure that your file manager is set to generate previews for files larger than 1 MB. Most file managers have this setting under the Preview tab in their Preferences.

A package is available in the AUR. Install it manually or using your favorite AUR helper.

$ yay -S stl-thumb

Download the .deb package for your platform (usually amd64) and install it. Packages are also available for armhf (Raspberry Pi) and arm64 (Pine64 and other SBCs).

$ sudo apt install ./stl-thumb_0.4.0_amd64.deb

For openSUSE Tumblweed there is a user repo available:

$ sudo zypper ar -f obs://home:jubalh:stl stl
$ sudo zypper ref
$ sudo zypper install stl-thumb

You can build the debug version with:

$ cargo build

When your done, build the realease version with:

$ cargo build --release

$ cargo install cargo-deb #this is an additional dependency
$ cargo deb

$ cargo install cargo-rpm #this is an additional dependency
$ cargo rpm build

$ stl-thumb <STL_FILE> [IMG_FILE]