Files and editor
The panel and its panes, the file tree, the code editor, diffs and the document editor
The panel next to the conversation is where you look at what the assistant did. It starts closed. The pane icons in the header open it: Files, Git, Preview, Terminal, Background tasks, and Plan while there is a task list.
Up to four panes can be open at once. One fills the panel, two stack, four form a grid. A click on an open pane's icon closes that pane. Each pane has its own header with Open in new window, Maximize and Close pane. Maximize gives one pane the whole space next to the sidebar, and the others stay open in the background. Drag the divider to give the conversation or the panel more room; a double-click switches between a comfortable width and the widest one that still leaves room to write. The app remembers the width on each device.
Files
A file tree across every shared folder. It reacts to changes as they happen, whether they came from the assistant, from the terminal, or from another program on your machine.
Right-click a file or folder for the usual actions: open, rename, delete, create a file or folder, copy the path.
The editor
Click a file and it opens in a full code editor with syntax highlighting for the language. Save with Cmd/Ctrl+S.
You and the assistant work in the same file at the same time. If it changes a file you have open, your unsaved edits win: the file is not reloaded underneath you while you have pending changes.
| File type | What you get |
|---|---|
| Code, config, text | The code editor |
| Markdown | A switch in the header between the editor and the rendered view |
| HTML, SVG | A switch between the source and the rendered result |
| Images, PDF, video | Rendered directly |
| Word, Excel, PowerPoint | The document editor |
| CSV, TSV | A grid, with a switch back to the raw text |
Some files open read only, with an explanation. That happens when what you see is an
extraction rather than the file: a scanned PDF, an .eml, an old .xls, or a file the app had to
decode from a different character encoding. Saving would replace the real file with its own text
version. What can genuinely be edited never lands there, it goes to the document editor.
Very large files open too. The editor asks for the whole file rather than the assistant's context-friendly window, which is why it can show a file the assistant itself only read in parts. Above about a megabyte, line wrapping and folding are turned off to keep it responsive.
Diffs
A change the assistant made shows up as a file card in the conversation. For code the card's action is Review, which opens the diff. For a file that can be shown rendered, such as Markdown or an Office document, the card has Open with instead: in the app, in the default application, or in one of the browsers found on your machine. The diff stays reachable from that menu.
Diffs appear over the Git pane, with a back arrow in the header. They are unified line diffs with line numbers, and the Git pane shows the added and removed line counts per file. For a calmer look at everything at once, open the review window.
The Git icon in the header gets a dot when there are changes you have not looked at yet.
Preview
For rendered output, a running dev server or a static file, see Preview. Code has its own preview tab. Cowork instead renders documents inside the editor tab, since there it is the same file you would edit.