File Preview

croot's split-pane preview lets you read files without leaving the file tree.

Toggle Preview

Click a file to open the preview pane. Click the same selected file again to hide the preview, or right-click a directory/workspace area and choose Toggle Preview. For keyboard-first use, enable toggle_preview = "p" in [keybindings].

Syntax Highlighting

The preview uses ANSI-native syntax highlighting, so code colors follow your terminal's theme instead of a fixed RGB palette. The built-in highlighter uses the syntect and two-face syntax bundle, covering Rust, Swift, TOML including Cargo.toml, Kotlin, Dockerfile, INI, Nix, Dart, Zig, TypeScript/TSX, SCSS, GraphQL, Terraform, JSON, Markdown, and many more.

Markdown Rendering

Markdown files are rendered with formatting by default. Press m to toggle between rendered and raw Markdown view.

Binary Files

Binary files are displayed as hex dumps with both hex values and ASCII representation.

Image Preview

Image preview is optional. Build or install with the image-preview Cargo feature to render supported image files inline:

cargo install croot --features image-preview

Configuration

[preview]
auto_preview = false      # Open preview automatically on start
preview_delay_ms = 150    # Debounce delay before preview updates
show_line_numbers = true  # Show line numbers
max_file_size_kb = 1024   # Skip files larger than this (KB)
syntax_highlight = true   # Legacy fallback for syntax.enabled
split_ratio = 0.5         # Width ratio (0.0 = all tree, 1.0 = all preview)
render_markdown = true    # Render Markdown by default
image_preview = false     # True by default only when built with image-preview
show_git_diff = true      # Show git diff gutter

[syntax]
enabled = true

[syntax.tokens.keyword]
fg = "magenta"
bold = true

[syntax.tokens.type]
fg = "cyan"

preview.syntax_highlight is still accepted as a legacy fallback, but new syntax color customization lives under [syntax].

Resizing

Drag the divider between the tree and preview to resize. The split_ratio config sets the default.

Directory Preview

When a directory is selected, the preview shows a listing of its contents with file counts.