File Explorer

File Explorer & Previews

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Browse local, WSL, and SSH files in a side panel, and preview Markdown, text, tables, images, and PDFs without leaving the terminal.

Opening the explorer

Press Ctrl+Shift+Alt+E to open the left-side File Explorer. It follows the active environment:

• Windows shells browse local Windows paths.
• WSL sessions browse the default WSL distro through wsl.exe.
• WispTerm SSH profile sessions browse the remote host through OpenSSH helpers.

Previewing files

Open a preview pane on the right in either of two ways:

• Hold Ctrl (Cmd on macOS) and click a .md, .txt, .csv, .tsv, a source-code or script file (including R scripts .r / .R), a supported image file, or a .pdf in terminal output, or
• double-click a supported file in the File Explorer.

Each content type (Markdown, plain text, CSV/TSV, image) keeps its own pane: previewing another file of the same type replaces that pane's content, while a different type opens a new pane stacked below the existing previews — a Markdown file, an image, and a CSV table can stay on screen at the same time.

What each type renders:

• Markdown — headings, lists, blockquotes, code blocks, inline code, links, and horizontal rules.
• Text / code / scripts — shown as plain text (.r, .R, .py, .zig, .sh, .json, and similar).
• CSV / TSV — shown as a grid table.
• Images — PNG, JPEG, GIF, BMP, and WebP are decoded directly into the panel.
• PDFs — rasterized one page at a time by the operating system's own PDF engine: Windows.Data.Pdf on Windows 10+, CoreGraphics on macOS, and the poppler-utils tools (pdfinfo / pdftoppm) on Linux (install with, for example, sudo apt install poppler-utils if the preview reports them missing). With the PDF preview focused, PageUp / PageDown turn pages, and the footer shows the current page as N/M next to the PDF badge. Encrypted PDFs are not supported.

Terminal path detection

Path clicks are resolved from terminal output, not only from files in the explorer. WispTerm keeps soft-wrapped paths together, follows path continuations across terminal line breaks, and can infer the directory prefix from nearby commands such as ls src/input. That means a bare filename listed by ls <dir> can preview as <dir>/<file> when the prefix is unambiguous.

Opening a file in your default app

Hold Ctrl (Cmd on macOS) and right-click a file path in a local terminal to open it in your operating system's default application for that file type (xdg-open on Linux, open on macOS, the registered handler on Windows).

This works for local terminals only — SSH and WSL paths cannot be opened by a local app, so there Ctrl-right-click falls through to the configured right-click-action (copy/paste); see Configuration. A plain right-click without Ctrl always performs the configured right-click-action.

Resizing, scrolling & zooming

• Drag the inner edges of the explorer and preview panels to resize them.
• Markdown, text, CSV, and TSV previews scroll with the mouse wheel; CSV/TSV cells show a larger hover popup when content does not fit.
• Image and PDF previews zoom with the mouse wheel and can be dragged to pan once zoomed.
• Ctrl+Shift+W closes the focused pane — click a preview pane (or press Ctrl+1-9) to select it, then close it like any other split.

Downloading remote files

In SSH profile sessions, hold Ctrl+Shift (Cmd+Shift on macOS) over a file path in terminal output to underline it, then click to download that remote file to %USERPROFILE%\Downloads. Downloads run in the background.

SSH metadata requirement

Remote preview and download require WispTerm's SSH profile metadata, so only sessions launched from the built-in SSH launcher are supported. Manually typing ssh user@host inside a local shell is still treated as that local shell and cannot use remote file preview — see SSH-Remote-Development.

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See also: SSH-Remote-Development · Browser-Jupyter-Panel