The sidebar has five tabs, Sessions, SFTP, Explorer, Tunnels and Macros. Ctrl+Shift+B or the sidebar button at the left of the toolbar folds it to a strip of the tab icons (click an icon to open the sidebar on that tab) and opens it again; PlexusTerm remembers it. With Settings → Appearance → Hide the sidebar completely when folded, folding hides it entirely. Settings → Appearance → Sidebar when PlexusTerm opens chooses how it starts: As I left it (the default), Open or Folded. Drag the sidebar's edge to change its width (between 160 and 640 px) and double-click the edge to go back to the default width; PlexusTerm remembers the width too. SFTP browses the remote files of the active SSH tab (its focused pane) over the same connection (it is disabled for local terminals) and opens automatically when an SSH session connects.
- Edit the path bar and press Enter, or use ↑ (parent), ⌂ (home folder) and ⟳ (refresh).
- Double-click a folder to open it, or a file to download it (a save dialog asks where).
- Drag an entry onto the terminal of the same SSH session: a folder dropped on an empty command line runs
cdto it; otherwise its path is typed at the cursor. Dropped on the AI chat, a file is attached to the next question (see File explorer). - Upload picks one or more local files; dropping files from the desktop onto the panel uploads them too. Both go into the current folder.
- New folder, New file (an empty file; an existing one is never replaced), Rename, Delete (asks for confirmation; only empty folders can be deleted) and Download act on the selected entry.
Right-click an entry for more:
- Open (enters a folder; opens a file in its default program, like Open with default program below), Download…, Rename…, Delete.
- Copy file path copies the full remote path; Copy file path to terminal types it into the focused pane of the active tab, quoted for the shell when needed. Middle-clicking an entry does the same.
- Properties shows the name, path, type, size, modification time, owner, group and permissions (
rwxr-xr-x (0755)). - Permissions… changes the mode (
chmod) with read/write/execute checkboxes for owner, group and others, kept in sync with the octal value. - For files: Open with default text editor (the Text editor chosen in Settings, or the system's default one), Open with default program, Open with… (choose a program) and Compare file with… (choose a local file; opens both in Meld, KDiff3, Kompare or Visual Studio Code, the first one installed). The open options download the file to a private temporary folder and watch it: each time the copy is saved, PlexusTerm asks the first time whether to upload it to the same remote path, then uploads it and reports the result. The temporary copies are deleted when the SSH session closes.
With Follow terminal folder on (the default), the browser follows the shell's working directory. A remote shell that reports it with an OSC 7 sequence is followed at once. Otherwise, while the SFTP tab is shown, PlexusTerm reads the folder of the session's shell on the server every second over the same connection, without typing anything in the terminal; this works on Linux servers (it needs /proc) and follows the shell's own folder, not that of a program it runs or of a shell started inside it with sudo -s or ssh. On other servers, make the shell report OSC 7; for bash, add this to the remote ~/.bashrc:
PROMPT_COMMAND='printf "\033]7;file://%s%s\007" "$HOSTNAME" "$PWD"'
Paths containing special characters may need percent-encoding; many distributions' vte.sh already emit OSC 7 that way.