The file manager

Kalem has a file manager like Emacs's Dired. Ctrl+Alt+D lists the folder of the document with the cursor on its file, and goes back to the document; the toolbar's File Manager and Projects buttons, the File and Project menus and the palette get there too, and opening a folder (Ctrl+O, kalem FOLDER, :e FOLDER) lists it. A window has one file manager, which goes from folder to folder.

The normal view lists a folder: permissions, size, modification time and name, folders first. The projects view (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+D, or Projects in the Project menu) lists every project as if they were in one folder; P switches between the two, and the projects' menu (right click) opens a project, removes it from the list (the folder stays) or adds one. Going up from a project's folder shows the projects again; going up from the projects goes to the folder above the project at the cursor.

The listing is read-only text: the arrow keys, search, and with Vim keys j k gg G and / work as in any document. A click on a name opens it. Commands act on the marked entries, or on the one at the cursor.

The keys every file manager has work too, with Command in place of Ctrl on macOS:

A right click (Shift+F10 or the Menu key from the keyboard) opens a menu with the usual entries of a file manager, from Open to Properties; the terminal shows it as a list to pick from, its groups parted by rules until something is typed. Delete for Good, Copy Paths, Reverse Order, Show in System File Manager and Stop File Operations are in the palette.

Copying and moving run in the background, with their progress in the status bar. When a file is already at the destination, Kalem asks: overwrite, skip, or keep both (name (2).ext), for that file or for all that are left. Ctrl+Z takes back the renames, moves and moves to the trash of this session, the last first. Cut and Copy keep the paths in Kalem's own file clipboard and put them on the system clipboard as text. In the graphical editor Paste also takes files copied in another application: the file list Finder or Explorer puts on the clipboard, or text whose every line is a file that exists, as a path or a file:// URI (what the Linux file managers give as text, with GNOME's cut line making it a move); Kalem's own copy wins when the clipboard holds the same paths. Pasting Kalem's files into Finder or Explorer as files does not work yet: the toolkit writes only text and pictures to the clipboard, so they paste there as their paths.

In the graphical editor, entries can be dragged (the marked ones when the line is marked): dropped on a listing, in another pane or the same one, they move into the folder under the pointer, or the listing's folder, with the same questions as Paste; with Alt (Option on macOS) held they are copied. Dropped on a document they are linked at the pointer, in its syntax: [[file:sub/b.org][b.org]] in Org, [b.org](sub/b.org) in Markdown, \href{…}{…} in LaTeX, relative to the document's folder when they are in it or below. Open in New Pane in the menu, or o as in Emacs, opens the entry beside the listing.

e makes the names editable, as Emacs's wdired does: change them with any editing command (old/a.txt moves the file there), then Ctrl+S renames them all at once, swaps included, and Escape leaves them as they were. Nothing changes when a name is empty or taken, or a line was changed outside its name; the edit stays to fix.

% f lists the files and folders under the folder, at any depth, whose names match a shell pattern (*.org) or contain the text given; they take marks and commands as other entries do, and ^ goes back. A searches the text of the files under the folder and opens a match at its line. i lists the folder at the cursor below the folder's own entries, as Dired does, and K takes it out again. * t marks the entries changed since an age (30m, 3d, 1w), today, yesterday or a date and time. ! runs a shell command on the marked files in their folder: a * standing alone is replaced by all of them, a ? runs the command once per file, as in Dired. In the graphical editor v shows the file at the cursor in a pane beside the listing, and Ctrl+T the listing's pictures as thumbnails.

With Vim keys the file manager's keys come first, except n, p, w and Backspace, which Vim keeps. From a document, - opens the file manager (as vim-vinegar and Doom do), and so do :Ex and :Explore; :Projects shows the projects. The keys are Doom Emacs's (its dired module with evil-collection and dirvish), listed below with what each does here or why it does not yet; the table is generated from tests/keys/doom-dired.toml, which the tests check against the keymaps.