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The Files panel exists for a practical reason: reviewing what the agent did without dropping TYBA and opening VSCode on the side. You open the file, read it, compare against the diff, and adjust — all in the same window where the session is running. In an SSH session the payoff is even bigger, because there’s no external editor over there to escape to. It isn’t an IDE and doesn’t try to be. It’s the surface for seeing and touching the project files the session is working on, with git in plain view.

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Opening the panel

1

Hit the shortcut

⌘⇧E on macOS, Ctrl+Shift+E on Windows and Linux — the same key as VSCode. You can change it in Settings → Shortcuts.
2

The panel opens on the current session

It shows up next to the terminal, split in two: the file tree on the left, the content on the right.
The tree’s root isn’t picked on the spot: it comes from the session’s context. In an agent session, the root is that session’s worktree. In a session inside a repository, it’s the repo root. Outside a repository, it’s the folder the session was in when you opened the panel. It doesn’t follow any cd you run afterward — it stays pinned to what it was when you opened it. If you need to realign, there’s a button to re-anchor on the current directory. And closing the panel ends that state: when you reopen it, the root is resolved again, in that moment’s context.

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The tree

The tree loads on demand: it only reads what you expand, so opening a large project doesn’t stall anything.
  • Dotfiles show up. In a terminal you expect to see .env and .github/, so they’re there.
  • Files in .gitignore show up dimmed and always start collapsed. node_modules/ and target/ don’t cost CPU until you expand them on purpose — the core is competing with the agents for the processor, and it won’t spend that for nothing.
  • .git/ stays hidden.
  • Every file has an icon by extension, and a very large directory shows a “+N items” line instead of dumping everything at once.

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Reading a file

Click any file and its content opens in the viewer on the right. It’s always the same gesture — clicking opens it to read.
  • Code comes with syntax highlighting.
  • Markdown opens rendered by default, with a toggle to see the raw source.
  • Images show up. SVG and HTML don’t: they open as text, on purpose — rendering SVG or HTML from a file an agent wrote is opening a door that doesn’t need to be open. For the same reason, a remote image inside a markdown file isn’t fetched (the alt becomes text) and links don’t navigate on their own.
  • Large files come paginated, in chunks, with a button to load the rest. The panel never throws tens of MB onto the screen at once.
The content you open in the viewer is not written anywhere — not to a database, not to a log. The viewer is transient: it shows and forgets.

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Git in plain view

Every file in the tree carries its git state next to it: modified, new, untracked, staged. What the mark means depends on where you are:
  • In an agent session, the mark is what that session touched — the difference since it started. A file the agent changed and already committed stays marked, because the question the tree answers is “what did this session touch.”
  • In a normal repository, it’s the usual working-tree state, same as the git panel.
Next to a modified file there’s a ± icon. Clicking it jumps straight to that file’s diff, without reopening anything. And the viewer header always has a button to open the file in your external editor, if you want to leave TYBA on purpose.

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Next

Editing files

Edit, save without clobbering the agent, and find files by name.