Browsing & Opening Files
An agent edits files and you want to see them, without leaving luvus and without losing the result to scrollback. The FILES dock puts your project’s tree in a sidebar, and any file opens either in luvus’s own read-only viewer or in a real editor.
The FILES dock
Section titled “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. luvus files tree and
luvus 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 luvus, 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
Section titled “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
Section titled “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
Section titled “Opening in vim, nano, or your editor”luvus 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, luvus falls back to the read-only viewer rather than doing nothing.
What this is not
Section titled “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.