Preview & metadata

The preview on the right follows the cursor. Toggle it with w.

Scrolling and searching

Keys	Action
`alt+j` / `alt+k` (or `alt+↓` / `alt+↑`)	Scroll half a page
Mouse wheel over the preview	Scroll
`alt+/`	Search inside the preview
`alt+n` / `alt+N`	Next / previous match

Matching lines are highlighted, and the bottom corner shows which lines you are looking at. The preview holds up to 5,000 lines of a file (the first 1 MB); syntax colours cover the first 2,000.

Item	Preview
Directories	Their contents, with icons
Source code	Syntax highlighting coloured from your theme
Markdown	Rendered: headings, lists, task boxes, quotes, tables, links and code blocks with syntax colours
CSV and TSV	An aligned table with the header row pinned; the separator (comma, tab, semicolon or pipe) is detected and quoted fields are understood. Long cells are cut with `…`; the first 1,000 rows of the first 256 KiB are shown, with the row count (estimated for bigger files)
JSON, YAML and TOML	A coloured outline in the file's key order, with item and key counts; containers nested more than 8 deep collapse to `{…12 keys}`. Invalid files (and files over 1 MB) show highlighted source instead
SQLite databases	Tables and views with row counts and columns, recognised by content rather than name. Opened read-only, never waits more than a moment on a locked database, and counts stop at 100,000 rows
Images	PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, BMP and ICO
Documents	The text of Word (`.docx`), PowerPoint (`.pptx`), Excel (`.xlsx`), OpenDocument (`.odt`, `.odp`, `.ods`) and EPUB files, with headings and tables
PDFs	The first page as an image, or its text, with title, author and page count
Videos	A representative frame, duration, resolution, frame rate, codecs and bitrate
Audio	Cover art, title, artist, album, duration and format
Archives	The list of files (formats strata can't open, such as `.7z`, via the `archive` plugin)
Binary files	A hex dump of the first 64 KiB, with the executable type

Images use the best protocol your terminal supports — kitty, sixel or iTerm2 — and a half-block approximation everywhere else.

Text is wrapped to the preview's width, and the hex dump shows 16, 8 or 4 bytes per row depending on the room. Documents are read without any external program.

PDF and media previews use tools you may already have; each is optional, and the preview says what is missing:

For	Install	Used for
PDFs	`poppler-utils`	`pdftoppm` (page image), `pdftotext` (text when images are off), `pdfinfo` (details)
Videos and audio	`ffmpeg`	`ffprobe` (details), `ffmpeg` (frame or cover art); `ffmpegthumbnailer` is used for video frames when installed
Videos and audio	`mediainfo` or `exiftool`	Details when `ffprobe` is missing

These previews work on local files. Each tool gets 8 seconds before the preview gives up.

To turn the richer previews off:

[general]
markdown_preview = true   # false shows the highlighted Markdown source
hex_preview = true        # false shows only the size of binary files
data_preview = true       # false shows CSV, JSON, YAML and TOML as source, SQLite as hex
media_preview = true      # false skips PDF, video and audio tools

[general]
preview = true
image_preview = true
syntax_highlight = true
preview_border = false   # superfile-style borderless preview
line_numbers = false

Metadata

The Metadata box in the footer shows the hovered item's name, type, size, modification date, permissions and path. For executables it also shows the architecture — for example ELF 64-bit x86-64, PE32+ ARM64 or Mach-O 64-bit arm64.

Turn on md5_checksum = true or sha256_checksum = true to see each file's MD5 or SHA-256 as well (# shows them on demand, see checksums). It is computed in the background and stops as soon as you move on, so large files never slow you down.