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Reference · Composing and shortcuts

File mentions

How to open the composer's file picker, which files it offers, and what a mention becomes once sent.

Ctrl + . (⌘ + . on a Mac) opens a file picker over the composer, listing the files under the session's working directory. Picking a file writes it into the draft at the caret as @path.

The picker takes its own focus, unlike the slash-command menu beside it. What is typed to find a file goes into the picker's own search box, never into the message.

Matching

Every word typed has to appear somewhere in the path, in any order — composer test finds Composer.test.tsx. An exact name match ranks first, then a name starting with what was typed, then a name containing it, then a path containing it anywhere. A tie within a tier goes to the shorter path, which puts a file near the root above the same name deep in a tree.

Which files are offered

Inside a git repository, the list is every tracked file plus every untracked file git would not ignore. Git's own exclude sources apply: the repository's .gitignore files, .git/info/exclude, and the excludes set for the whole machine. Nothing under .git ever appears in the list. A file staged and then removed from disk still does, since nothing reads it to check.

Outside a git repository, the folder is walked directly, and .git, node_modules, .venv and __pycache__ are never entered. A symlink is left alone. A .gitignore file found along the way is applied, covering comments, negation with !, a leading-slash anchor, a trailing-slash directory pattern, *, ? and **. A character class and a backslash escape in a .gitignore are not read, and neither is a .gitignore outside the folder being walked.

The walk stops once it reaches a fixed number of files, or a fixed depth of folders. The picker says so at the bottom of the list when it was cut short.

Once sent

@path reaches the model as part of the message, in the form the CLI itself reads as a file reference. In the sender's own message it renders as plain text, and pressing it does nothing there. A reply that names the same path turns that occurrence into a link to the file, the same as any reference in the model's prose. Pressing it opens the file in the editor set on Settings' External editor field.