Browsing & Opening Files

An agent edits files and you want to see them, without leaving artuditu and without losing the result to scrollback. The FILES dock puts your project’s tree in a sidebar, and any file opens in bat, artuditu’s native read-only viewer, or a real editor.

The FILES dock

Press Ctrl+Space e to show or hide it, or place it from Settings → Layout like any other dock. It follows the active workspace, so switching projects re-roots the tree.

The global fuzzy finder can search every eligible file name and relative path in the workspace even when its folder has never been expanded here. Press Ctrl+Space /, then choose Files with Tab. It indexes paths only, follows Git ignore rules when Git is available, skips .git, and never follows directory symlinks.

Folders expand and collapse in place. artu files tree and artu files refresh also work while the dock is hidden or immediately after a server restore; directory reads stay off the app loop.

Names are tinted by git status as you work: amber for modified, green for added or untracked, coral for deleted or conflicted, mint for renamed, with a letter badge and a mark on any folder that contains changes. Files created outside artuditu, by an agent or a command in a pane, show up on their own within a couple of seconds.

Right-click a row for New File, New Folder, Rename, Copy Path, and Delete (Delete always asks first).

Opening a file

Gesture	What happens
Click	opens using your default (see below)
Shift+click	always opens the native read-only viewer in a pane beside the focus
Right-click	pick per file: read-only, or any editor you have installed

Shift+click is the fixed “just let me look at this” gesture. It stays read-only no matter what you set as the default, which is what you want when you are reading a file next to a running agent.

The read-only viewer

Fast, native, and deliberately read-only. It never blocks on a large file, caps what it will load into memory, and detects binaries instead of spraying them at your terminal. An open file re-reads itself when it changes on disk, so a file an agent is editing stays current in front of you.

Key	Action
j / k, ↓ / ↑	line down / up
d / u	half page down / up
Space / PageUp	page down / up
g / G	top / bottom
h / l	scroll sideways when wrapping is off
w	toggle soft wrap
/, then n / N	search, next / previous match
y or c	copy the whole file
q / Esc	close

Dragging across the text selects and copies it, the same as in any pane.

Opening in bat, vim, nano, or your editor

artuditu first looks for bat (including the batcat executable used by some distributions), then vim, nvim, nano, vi, helix, micro, and emacs on your PATH, and also honours $EDITOR. Only commands you actually have are offered, so there are no dead options in the menu.

The default read-only choice always uses artuditu’s native viewer — scrollable and searchable, including with the mouse wheel. Shift+click does the same, so a file can be read beside the focused pane. bat, when chosen explicitly from the cycle below, runs as a real terminal pager in its own tab (artuditu forces paging on for short files).

An editor opens in a new tab at full width, running as a real terminal program. The tab is titled after the editor, and when you quit the editor the tab closes itself.

To set what a plain click does, go to Settings → General → “Open files with” and step through the choices with ‹ ›: native read-only (the default), then each detected command — bat (read-only), vim, nano, … To override it for one file, right-click that file and pick from the menu.

If you set an editor and later uninstall it, artuditu falls back to the read-only viewer rather than doing nothing.

What this is not

The file viewer does not do syntax coloring. To review staged and working-tree patches with split or stack layouts and local notes, switch the dock to DIFF. Use the git tab for branches, commits, pull requests, issues, and commit flow. To edit, open the file in an editor as above.