Files

Files

Every container on This Mac has a Files tab, after the divider with Terminal. It is a small Finder for the container's filesystem. Browse it, open and share files, copy them in and out, and make, rename, move and delete things.

A paired host's containers have no Files tab. This is This Mac's own tool. (A host's page has a different tab called Files. It mounts the host's shared folders in Finder. See Hosts.)

What it needs

• The container is running. A stopped container has no filesystem to browse. The tab says Container is not running and names it.
• This Mac's owner's interactive exec permission. Without it the tab says Files are unavailable. See Terminal.
• ls and find inside the image. container copy cannot list a directory, so Flotilla lists with ls and find run in the container. A distroless or scratch image has neither, and the tab says Cannot read these files, with Try again.

Paths are as the container sees them, not as this Mac does.

Looking around

The toolbar, from the left:

• Back and Forward through the folders you have visited.
• Three views: icons, a list and columns. The list has Name, Date Modified, Size and Kind, and a click on a heading sorts by it. A second click reverses the order. Folders in the list expand in place. Columns work like Finder's.
• Group by — None, Name, Kind, Date Modified or Size. The other choices Finder has are greyed out, because a container's files do not record them.
• Share, Download to this Mac, and ⋯, the file actions.
• Search here.

The foot of the tab has the path as clickable breadcrumbs, so you can jump back several levels at once, the count of items and how many are selected, and Reload. A long path scrolls and shows its last folder.

Select with a click, ⇧-click, ⌘-click or ⌘A. In the icon and column views, ↑ and ↓ move the selection, and ⇧ extends it. Return opens.

Searching

Type in Search here and press Return. It looks for names below the current folder. It stops at 500 results or 10 seconds. Click a result to go to its folder with it selected. The ✕ clears the search.

Opening and sharing

• Open on a folder goes into it. On files, Flotilla copies them to a private temporary folder on this Mac and opens them in the app macOS chooses.
• Open With… picks the app.
• Share copies the files the same way and shows the macOS share picker.

The temporary copies are removed when you quit Flotilla.

Copying out and in

Download… copies the selected items out to a place you choose. With one item, you name it in a save panel. With several, you choose a folder, and Flotilla refuses if two have the same name. If something is already there, you are asked before it is Replaced. The tooltip says Copy «name» out of the container, because nothing is fetched from a network.

Upload a File… copies a file from this Mac into the current folder. It asks first if a file of that name is already there.

Changing things

⋯ and the right-click menu also have New Folder…, Rename…, Move to… and Delete….

• Move to… takes an absolute folder path in the container.
• Delete… names what it will delete and says it cannot be undone. A folder is deleted with everything in it.
• A name Flotilla cannot spell back exactly, because it has bytes that are not valid text, is read-only. Rename, move and delete are greyed out for it, and the tooltip says why. That stops a command from reaching a different file than the one you clicked.

These run as commands in the container, so they need the exec permission above. Flotilla builds each one as a list of arguments, never as shell text.

Controls that are refused rather than stuck

Back and Forward at the ends of your history, and the file actions where they are not possible, are disabled, not spinning.

This is the same bug the built-in network's delete button had: "you cannot do this" was passed as the busy flag, so the control span forever and claimed the app was working when it was refusing. busy now means in flight; disabled means not offered. If a control here is greyed out, it is because the action is genuinely unavailable, and it is not going to complete if you wait.

Scope

There is no in-place editor. To change a file's contents, open a terminal in the container, or edit a copy and upload it.