Project explorer
The file tree: browse, rename, delete, and hand files to the agent.
The project explorer is Mel's file tree. It lives in the tools panel, roots itself at your project automatically, and is the fastest way to hand a specific file to the agent.
Opening it
- Press
ctrl+\to show the tools panel, then click the tree icon in its icon strip. - Or run
/explorerin the terminal prompt or an agent conversation. - The tool belt above a CLI agent session (claude, codex, …) has a File explorer button that opens it directly.
Mel remembers whether the panel was open and which view you were on, so it comes back the way you left it.
Where the tree is rooted
The explorer roots at the active pane's git toplevel, falling back to that pane's working directory when there is no repository. It re-resolves when the pane's directory changes, so the tree, global search, the diffs, and your shell always agree on which project you are in.
Directory listings load in the background and are cached per directory, so expanding a large folder never blocks the window. Dotfiles are hidden; directories sort before files.
Working with files
| Action | How |
|---|---|
| Expand / collapse a folder | Click the row, or its › chevron |
| Open a file in the editor | Double-click it |
| Rename | Right-click ▸ Rename — the row becomes an input; press Enter |
| Delete | Right-click ▸ Delete. Directories ask a second time (the label changes to "Delete — click again") because the delete is recursive and permanent |
| Reveal in your file manager | Right-click ▸ Reveal in Files |
| Copy the path | Right-click ▸ Copy Path / Copy Relative Path |
| Open elsewhere | Right-click ▸ Open in New Pane / Open in New Tab — the new pane starts in that directory |
Renames and deletes report what happened. If a rename collides with an existing name, or a delete is refused by permissions, Mel says so instead of quietly snapping the row back.
Handing a file to the agent
Two routes, and both land in whichever input you are actually looking at — the agent conversation if one is open, the terminal prompt otherwise, or the running CLI agent's own input if a session has the pane:
- Right-click ▸ Attach as Context — inserts the project-relative path.
- Drag the row onto the prompt or conversation — same result, with a short "parent · File" hint above the input confirming what landed.
Attaching twice appends, so you can build up a list of files before you type your question.
Finding a file by name
The explorer is for browsing. When you already know roughly what the file is called, press ctrl+P and type part of the name — the command palette fuzzy-matches file paths alongside commands, conversations, and Drive objects, and opens the match in the editor. /open-file does the same from either prompt.
The file index includes untracked files, so something the agent wrote seconds ago is findable before you have staged it. Outside a git repository Mel falls back to a bounded directory walk that skips node_modules, target, .git, and the other usual heavy trees.