File Explorer

File Explorer & Previews

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Browse local, WSL, and SSH files in a side panel, and preview Markdown, text, tables, and images 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 the right-side preview panel in either of two ways:

• Hold Ctrl (Cmd on macOS) and click a .md, .txt, .csv, .tsv, or supported image file in terminal output, or
• double-click a supported file in the File Explorer.

What each type renders:

• Markdown — headings, lists, blockquotes, code blocks, inline code, links, and horizontal rules.
• Text — shown as plain text.
• CSV / TSV — shown as a grid table.
• Images — PNG, JPEG, GIF, BMP, and WebP are decoded directly into the panel.

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 previews zoom with the mouse wheel and can be dragged to pan once zoomed.
• Ctrl+Shift+W closes the preview panel before it closes a 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