anefzaoui/misterdownloadmanager

What it is

Mister Download Manager (MDM) is a clean-room download manager written in Rust, intended as a free alternative to IDM. It splits files into parallel segments, resumes interrupted transfers, and adds torrent/magnet handling, page video downloads via yt-dlp, browser capture through a native messaging host, queues with a scheduler, rate limits, and an 86-language UI including right-to-left layouts. A CLI, a local API and an MCP server let scripts and AI assistants list, add, pause and remove downloads.

The repository is a Cargo workspace with separate crates for the engine, egui app, CLI, MCP server, native messaging host, IPC, yt-dlp/ffmpeg tooling, BitTorrent (via librqbit) and a fault-injecting test server. It is licensed GPL-3.0.

Quick start

On Windows, download the latest release and pick one of the release assets:

File	Use
...-setup.exe	Default choice: installs MDM, connects the browser and asks for language
...-portable.zip	Unzip and run without installing; everything stays in the folder
...-x64.zip	Plain programs without the installer
...-extension-chromium.zip / ...-extension-firefox.xpi	Browser extension only

The installer is not code-signed yet, so Windows SmartScreen may show "Windows protected your PC"; the README instructs clicking More info → Run anyway. After installation, use your first download guide or paste a URL into the app.

For macOS and Linux, builds are marked experimental: .dmg for Apple Silicon or Intel, .AppImage, .deb, .rpm or .tar.gz for Linux. These builds have not been tested by the project itself.

Building from source needs Rust stable 1.95 or later (MSVC toolchain on Windows):

cargo build --release
cargo test

This produces the app, CLI, MCP server and native messaging host under target/release/. Browser integration from a build requires registering the host with misterdownloadmanager-nmhost.exe --register, then loading the extension/ folder as an unpacked extension in Developer mode.

Constraints

• The repository is an early preview: the README says the engine and main window are solid, but some corners are "good enough for now".
• No code signing yet; the macOS and Linux builds are untested; Firefox support is still in testing.
• Translations are machine-made and await native speaker review.
• Video downloads depend on yt-dlp/ffmpeg tooling; torrent support uses librqbit.
• Prebuilt binaries are published from the project's own release page, with the source available in the workspace; the release artifacts' correspondence to this source cannot be verified from the provided material.

HotRepo's take

The project was recorded on the new-projects list on 2026-11-04, gaining 8 stars in roughly an hour (from 106 to 114) after having built a base of about 106 stars earlier. That is a single short snapshot, so it supports only a modest early interest, not a trend. The README is unusually detailed for its age, with a documented benchmark harness, a test server and crates for every component; the benchmark claims are the author's own and have not been independently verified. For most users the practical facts are: a free IDM-like feature set, a working Windows build, and experimental macOS/Linux support.