Files

Files

Browsing is always available. Everything that changes a file is off until the server is started with --allow-write.

Getting around

• Type a path where the path is shown. Click the address in the header and it becomes a box: write /mnt/disk2/…, press Enter, and you are there — no walking three folders a click at a time. ~ means your home. Folders are offered as you type, from the folder you are writing into. A path that is not there says so in the box, in red, and the listing under it stays where it was rather than emptying. Escape, or clicking away, cancels; only Enter commits. Copying the path is now a button inside that box — it used to be what clicking the address did, which is a thing wanted rarely and guessable by nobody, while going somewhere by name had no way in at all.
• List or tree, switchable per pane; hidden files on or off.
• Search within a folder, recursively, skipping the directories nobody means (node_modules, .git, target, .cache…).
• Favourites, kept on the server so every device sees the same ones. There are three separate lists — main (the Files screen), sidebar, and windows — because a pane in a desk wants different pins from the sidebar. The strip says which list you are looking at. The star pins the folder you are in; the ✕ on a row removes that row.
• Two panes side by side, and the second pane is the default destination for a move or a copy.
• Drag a row where you want it. Onto the other pane, or onto any folder you can see — in either pane, including the one you are dragging from. The folder under the pointer wins over the pane behind it, which is the commonest move there is and the one every file manager has done since 1984. What is under the pointer is outlined, and the chip travelling with the row says what will happen when you let go.
• A listing notices files it did not create: a job writing output from tmux never passes through Argus, so the folder is re-read every few seconds and redrawn only when something actually changed. Trees are left to the ↻ button — re-running one would close every branch you had opened.

Changing things

Rename, move, copy, delete, new folder, upload. Nothing is ever overwritten silently: a name that already exists is refused rather than replaced, and a delete of a non-empty folder has to be confirmed.

Three of them are on the row itself — copy the path, rename, delete. Everything else lives behind the ⋮, which is right for moving, copying and downloading: you do those thinking about it. These three are not those. They are what you do to the thing you are already looking at, and going through a sheet to reach them is three taps for a two-tap thought.

Only where there is a pointer. On a phone, three targets in a row is a lottery, and the ⋮ is one honest target with all of it behind it.

Copying says that it copied. The clipboard button becomes a tick for a moment, because a button that copies and then looks exactly as it did is a button you press again to be sure. Same everywhere a path is copied — the address bar, the link tray, a desk's link.

A link is also a way to upload. The 🔗 button next to ↑ takes an address and the machine fetches it straight into the folder you are looking at — no coming down to this device and going back up again, which from a phone is the whole journey twice. It streams to a part-file and renames only when complete, like any other upload, and nothing is ever overwritten.

A link behind a login works: there is a box for headers, one per line, and pasting a whole curl command — the thing every browser's network panel offers as Copy as cURL — fills in the address, the -H headers, -b cookies and -u credentials from it. Nothing is stored; they are used for that one request.

Three arrangements, one choice. Icons, a list, or the tree — three buttons in a set, because only one can be on and being adjacent is the whole explanation.

• Icons lay a folder out the way every desktop has for forty years: a glyph and a name, in rows that wrap. For finding your way, which is most of what a folder of folders is for — names in a column all look alike, and an eye that knows a project by where its folder sits has nothing to work with.
• A list is for reading: sizes, dates, forty lines at a glance.
• The tree expands folders in place, for following a path down without losing where you came from.

Same click and the same menu in all three: a right-click where there is a right button, a long press where there is not — half a second, with enough slack for a hand that is never quite still, and the tap that would otherwise follow it is swallowed so the menu does not also open the folder behind itself. A browser in a window remembers its own arrangement; the panes and the sidebar share one.

Uploading takes drag-and-drop onto a pane, or the ↑ button. Files are streamed to a dotted part-file and renamed into place only once complete, so an interrupted upload never leaves a truncated file wearing the real name.

Dropping onto a session instead of a pane puts the file in one folder the server keeps for that and hands you its absolute path, which is what a terminal wants — see dropping a file onto a session.

Text you have, rather than a file you have, is the third button in the row: it opens a window you paste into, and what you paste is written into this folder as a file, with the path handed back — see text you have, as a file you can name.

Pasting a screenshot — Ctrl+V in a listing — writes the clipboard image into the folder you are looking at, named screenshot-1.png, screenshot-2.png, and hands the path back to the clipboard so you can paste it into a session as the next instruction. The number is the server's: it fills gaps and never overwrites.

What a folder weighs is a button on the row, not a column, because finding out means walking the tree. It stops at 400k entries or twenty seconds and then says "at least" rather than presenting a partial sum as a total. Symlinks are counted as the small things they are and never followed.

Editing

Text files open in an editor with a save button. The save is refused if the file changed on disk since it was opened — the normal case when a job is writing to it — and a file too large to have been read whole cannot be saved from a preview, because that preview was only its tail.