Navigate and select

Each pane has its own location, focus, selection, sort order, filter, and history. Commands apply to the active pane; press Tab to switch panes.

Open a location

Press Enter on a directory to enter it. Enter always acts on the focused entry, never on the selection.
Press Backspace or open .. to go to the parent directory, with the folder you came out of focused.
On Linux and Windows, press Ctrl + Backspace to jump to the filesystem root (the current drive or share root on Windows). On macOS Go to Root is unbound, because Command + Backspace moves files to Trash; bind it in Settings if you want it.
Press Mod + L to type a path. The dialog accepts absolute and relative paths, ~, environment variables, and mounted paths such as s3://bucket/key.
Press Mod + G to find a file or folder below the current directory by name. See Go to File.
When a Windows filesystem is mounted, including one in a remote session, press Shift plus a drive letter to jump to that drive’s root.
Click a breadcrumb segment to return to that part of the path, or the final segment to open the path dialog. Right-click the path bar to copy the path up to the clicked segment, or for commands such as Go To, Hot Paths, Add to Bookmarks, and New Terminal Here.
Press Mod + Left in the right pane, or Mod + Right in the left pane, to open the focused directory or archive in the other pane.
Press Mod + . (As Other Pane) to take the active pane to the other pane’s directory.
Press Mod + U to swap the two panes, each with its location, selection, sorting, filter, and history.

Path separators follow the filesystem in the pane, not the computer showing Newt. On a Unix-style filesystem \ is an ordinary filename character; on a Windows-style filesystem a leading \ or / starts at the current drive or share root.

Opening a regular file with Enter uses the system application; opening a recognized archive or disc image mounts it in the pane. File associations can change both, for example to open Newt’s viewer or editor or run a user command. Entering a directory symlink keeps the link path. Press Shift + Enter on a symlink to open the target’s real parent directory with the target focused.

Files on S3, SFTP, archives, or a remote session are downloaded to a temporary directory before the system application opens them. Changes saved in that copy are not written back to the original. To change the original, edit it in Newt’s editor with F4, or copy the edited file back.

Press Shift + F3 to reveal the focused entry in the system file manager (Finder, Explorer, or the Linux desktop’s file manager). This works only for files on this computer.

Open With

Right-click a file and choose Open With to pick from the applications the system offers for it, with the default first. Other… opens the system’s own application chooser. The command is also in the Command Palette as Open With…, with no default shortcut. It is offered for files only, and remote files are downloaded first, as with Enter.

On Linux, the chooser requires xdg-desktop-portal.

Navigate history

Each pane keeps its own history. Tap Alt + Left or Alt + Right to step back or forward. Hold Alt and keep pressing the arrow keys to preview further entries, then release Alt to open the highlighted one. The mouse’s back and forward buttons also step through history.

Press Mod + Y to open the history as a dialog. Entries on unmounted filesystems are shown dimmed and cannot be opened. Remove an entry with its × button or Delete; removing old archive entries lets Newt release their temporary mounts.

Hot Paths and bookmarks

Press Mod + P to open Hot Paths. Type part of a name or path, select a result, and press Enter to open it in the active pane.

Depending on the operating system, the list includes:

saved Newt bookmarks;
standard folders such as Home, Documents, and Downloads;
GTK bookmarks on Linux;
mounted volumes: drives on Windows, /Volumes on macOS, and network shares and removable media on Linux;
recent folders: on Linux the folders of recently used files, and on macOS Finder’s Go to Folder history.

Every category except bookmarks can be turned off under Hot Paths in Settings. In a remote session, standard folders, volumes, and recent folders come from the remote host.

Press Mod + B to bookmark the active pane’s location. New bookmarks go to the top of the list, and bookmarking an existing path moves it to the top; the confirmation offers Undo. Bookmarks are stored in settings.toml, where you can rename them:

[[bookmark]]
path = "/home/user/projects"
name = "Projects"

A bookmark can point into a mounted filesystem, such as s3://bucket/prefix or a path inside an archive. An s3:// or sftp:// bookmark is dimmed and tagged unmounted until you connect to a matching filesystem.

Focus and selection

The focused row is the cursor. A selection is the set of operation targets. When nothing is selected, most file operations use the focused row.

Action	Keyboard
Move focus	`↑`, `↓`, `Page Up`, `Page Down`, `Home`, `End`
Toggle the focused item and advance	`Insert`
Extend the selection through every row passed over	`Shift` + movement key
Select all visible entries	`Mod` + `A`
Clear the selection	`Mod` + `D`
Invert the visible selection	Numpad `*`
Select or deselect by pattern	Numpad `+` / `-`

The pattern and invert shortcuts use the numeric keypad so that +, -, and * on the main row stay available for quick search. Without a numeric keypad, assign alternatives in the Keybindings tab.

With the pointer, use platform-standard modifier-click and shift-click selection. Drag outside the Name column, or below the last row, to make a rectangular selection; dragging in the Name column drags the files instead (see Clipboard and drag and drop). Right-clicking a row outside the selection focuses it but keeps the selection: Copy or Delete still act on the selection, while single-entry commands such as Rename use the clicked row.

Hold Alt (Option on macOS) while turning the mouse wheel to move the cursor one row per notch instead of scrolling; add Shift to select as it moves.

Select by Pattern and Deselect by Pattern accept a case-insensitive glob such as *.rs or IMG_*.{jpg,png}, or a regular expression starting with /, such as /^report-\d+\.pdf$. They only affect entries visible under the current filter. Select Same Extension, in the Command Palette, adds visible files with the focused file’s extension.

Sort and arrange columns

Click a column heading to sort by it; click again to reverse. The Name heading has a separate Ext target for sorting by extension. Press Mod + Shift + S for the keyboard sort menu, where each sort key has an underlined letter: press it to sort, again to reverse, or with Shift to sort descending. The menu also toggles folders-first ordering.

Name sorting ignores case and by default compares character by character, so IMG_10 comes before IMG_2. Enable Natural Sort under Appearance in Settings to sort numbers by value, as Finder and Explorer do.

Right-click a column heading to show or hide columns. Drag headings to reorder them and drag separators to resize them; double-click a separator to fit the column to its contents. Hold Shift while resizing or fitting to apply it to both panes.

Columns adapt to the filesystem: Unix filesystems can show User, Group, and Mode, and Windows filesystems can show Attributes (R read-only, H hidden, S system, A archive, L reparse point, C compressed, E encrypted). The Size column can show exact bytes or prefixed values in decimal (1.5 GB) or binary (1.4 GiB) units.

Hidden files and refresh

Press Mod + H to show or hide hidden files. The toggle applies to every pane in every window and is remembered across restarts.

Local panes refresh automatically when the filesystem changes. On macOS, if a pane’s folder is moved, deleted, or unmounted, the pane moves to the nearest folder that still exists. To refresh manually, use Refresh File List from the Command Palette or Refresh in the pane’s context menu (unbound by default; you can bind it in Settings).

See Search and filter for narrowing the current listing or producing recursive results.