Browsing & Opening Files

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

Folders expand and collapse in place. 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 bohay, 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 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 vim, nano, or your editor

bohay looks for vim, nvim, nano, vi, helix, micro, and emacs on your PATH, and also honours $EDITOR. Only editors you actually have are offered, so there are no dead options in the menu.

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 ‹ ›: read-only (the default) or any detected editor. To override it for one file, right-click that file and pick from the menu.

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

What this is not

The viewer does not do syntax coloring, and it does not show a diff. To see what changed, use the git tab, which lists changed files and the commit flow. To edit, open the file in an editor as above.