Files and Preview

Files shows the task's copy, the folder the agent works in, and Preview shows one of its files large. Both show the copy as it is now, not your real folder. Neither ever follows a link or leaves the copy.

Files

Files (Mod+Shift+E) shows the task's copy as a tree:

• each file and folder has its icon, as VS Code's Material Icon Theme draws it (a Rust file, a package.json, a src folder, …);
• files the task changed are marked;
• the button at the top shows the whole copy in Finder (Files on Linux).

Click a file to open it in Preview. Right-click a file or folder for the outside Kule actions.

Preview

Preview (Mod+4) shows the picked file:

Kind	How it shows
Text and code	With line numbers and colours, as in an editor: 53 languages, up to 300 KB coloured and 1 MB shown.
JSON or XML packed onto a line or two	Formatted lays it out (up to 1 MB).
Markdown	Laid out, or as its source.
PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP	Fitted to the panel or at 100%.
CSV and Excel (.xlsx)	A grid from A1, each sheet a tab. A bar shows a picked cell's value or formula. Formulas are not computed: a cell shows the value Excel saved with it.
Word (.docx)	Headings, paragraphs, numbered lists and tables, to read. Formatting, pictures and notes are left out.
Anything else	Its size and why it is not shown.

The colours follow the theme in use. Excel and Word files are read in memory, never unpacked to disk, and each part is inflated only up to a cap.

Outside Kule

Right-click a file or folder in Files, or use the commands:

Action	macOS	Linux
Open with its app (the picked file)	⌘O	Ctrl+O
Show in Finder / Files (the picked file, or the copy)	⌥⌘R	Ctrl+Alt+R
Copy path (where it is on disk)	⌥⌘C	Ctrl+Alt+C
Open the copy in your editor (task's ⋮ menu)	⇧⌘O	Ctrl+Shift+O

Where the Preview does not show a file (a PDF, a film, a slide deck), it offers Open with its app and Show in Finder. Above a Word or Excel file, which it shows only in part, Open with its app is there too.

Open with its app

Opens documents, pictures, sound and video with the app your computer uses for them: PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OpenDocument, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, EPUB, RTF, CSV, plain text, and the common picture, sound and video kinds.

What Kule will not open

Never a program, a script, a web page or SVG, a link file, or an Office file with macros. The agent wrote them, and they would run on your computer, outside the sandbox. A file must also be what its name says: a script named notes.pdf is not opened. And it waits while the agent is at work.

Show in Finder / Files

Points at the file in its folder and never opens it, so a folder named like an app is not started.

Open the copy in your editor

VS Code, Cursor or Zed, the ones your computer has. The menu lists each, the one you used last first. The first time for each editor, Kule says what an editor runs by itself from a folder (tasks, settings, recommended extensions, git hooks) and how to keep it from doing so:

• in VS Code, answer no when it asks whether you trust the authors (Restricted Mode);
• Cursor does not ask unless Workspace Trust is on in its settings.

It is refused, as the terminal is, while the task changed the copy's git config or hooks. What you change in the editor shows in Review like the agent's work.

Asking the agent about a place in a file

In Preview, point at what you mean instead of describing it:

• pick some text: lines of code, a paragraph, a Markdown section;
• drag over cells in a sheet;
• drag over a region of a picture.

An Ask button shows beside what you picked (Mod+Shift+A does the same). To ask about the whole file, use Ask about it above the Preview, or Mod+Shift+A with nothing picked. The box that opens offers two things:

Choice	What happens
Ask now	Write the question; the agent gets it at once.
Add to prompt	The place becomes a chip over the prompt line, so you can collect several places (up to 20) and write one prompt about them. Chips stay with their task until the prompt is sent.

The agent gets the places as a numbered list after your prompt, each named so it can find it:

• lines of a file;
• the source lines and headings of a Markdown section;
• a range of cells and the values in it;
• a region in the picture's own pixels;
• a numbered paragraph of a Word document.

An agent that takes pictures also gets each picked region as a picture (three to a prompt). One that does not gets where the region is, and Live says so. Live shows a prompt's places as chips over it.

From a terminal

kule path TASK [FILE] prints where the copy, or a file in it, is on disk (cd "$(kule path TASK)"), and kule open TASK FILE opens a file of the copy with its app, held to the same kinds and checks (--dry-run checks it and prints where it is).