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Documentation

A short reference for Seek's main surfaces. Living document — submit issues or PRs against website/docs.md if you find a gap.

Panes

Seek runs in a unified workspace that scales from a single pane to four. Adjust the count any time from the toolbar (+ / ) or the command palette.

  • One pane for everyday browsing.
  • Two panes for commander-style file moving.
  • Three or four panes when you're working across multiple folders, repos, or remotes at once.

The inspector (⌥⌘I) is independent of pane count — toggle it on or off whenever you want. Tabs live inside each pane; tear them off, drag them between panes, restore them on launch.

Tabs

Real tabs per pane. Tear them off, drag them between panes, restore them on launch.

  • ⌘T — new tab in the active pane.
  • ⌘W — close the current tab.
  • ⌘⇧T — reopen the last closed tab.
  • Drag a tab out of the window to spawn a new window. Drag it back to dock it.

Address Bar

Press ⌘L to focus the address bar. Type or paste any path — ~, environment variables, and relative paths all resolve. Drop a folder onto it to navigate. Tokens in the breadcrumb are clickable.

For absolute jumps with autocomplete, ⌘⇧G opens "Go to path…".

Command Palette

Press ⌘K. Fuzzy-search every action, recent path, favorite, open tab, remote connection, smart folder, and git command. Whatever you'd reach for in a menu lives here too.

Remote Connections

Seek speaks SFTP, WebDAV, and S3 today (plus R2, B2, MinIO, DigitalOcean Spaces, Wasabi). FTP and SMB are on the near-term roadmap. Browse a remote folder like a local one.

  • Saved connections live in Keychain.
  • SSH config (~/.ssh/config), agent forwarding, and jump hosts are honored.
  • Transfers are queueable, throttleable, and resumable on reconnect.
  • Sync-to-local-cache mode lets you browse offline.

Open the connection sheet from the sidebar's "Remotes" group, or via the palette.

Git

In any folder that's part of a git repo, Seek shows status badges next to every file (M / A / D / R / ? / ! / U) and a header strip with the branch, ahead/behind counters, and a fetch button.

  • Right-click any file for stage / unstage / discard / restore.
  • Commit with subject and body, sign-off, GPG sign.
  • Branch switch / create / delete / rename.
  • Pull / push / fetch with remote picker.
  • Merge / rebase with abort and continue.
  • Blame, history (graph + filter), and diff all open in Quick Look.
  • Conflicts get an inline three-way viewer.

Every git action is reachable from the command palette.

Embedded Terminal

Toggle the terminal panel from the toolbar or via the command palette. Each Seek window has its own panel; each panel hosts multiple tabs.

  • Up / Down — recall history, anchored to whatever prefix you'd already typed (zsh-style).
  • Ctrl+R — reverse-search ranked by frecency (recency × frequency × cwd-match) over the persistent log.
  • Tab — expand a snippet trigger ending the current input (/today<Tab> → today's date).
  • The shell history JSONL log lives at ~/Library/Caches/Seek/shell_history.jsonl and survives restarts.
  • Pop out to your real terminal (Terminal.app / iTerm / Ghostty) — Seek warns if you have unsent input.

Clipboard History

Seek polls the system pasteboard once per second and keeps the most recent 50 text entries. Open the sheet with ⇧⌘] or via the command palette ("Clipboard History…"). Search across history, double-click or hit Return to copy a row back, and the selected entry promotes to the top.

The default chord (⇧⌘]) is non-colliding — Raycast and Alfred users tend to bind ⇧⌘V globally, and we deliberately picked something else.

Snippets

Stored at ~/Library/Application Support/Seek/snippets.json. Manage them via "Snippets…" in the command palette. Each snippet has a trigger (e.g. /today), a body, and an optional note.

Placeholders inside a body expand at insertion time:

TokenExpands to
YYYY-MM-DD
YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm
Most recent clipboard entry
Active terminal session's working directory
$HOME

Inside the terminal, type your trigger and press Tab to expand.

Workspaces

A workspace snapshot captures the current pane count, each pane's tab list, the active tab per pane, view styles, and inspector visibility — and persists to ~/Library/Application Support/Seek/workspaces.json.

Use "Save Workspace…" / "Load Workspace…" in the command palette. Restoring is best-effort: missing folders are silently dropped (so a moved repo doesn't crash the restore).

Trash History

Every file Seek moves to Trash is logged with original path, display name, size, and timestamp. Open "Trash History…" from the command palette to recover items without manually digging through ~/.Trash. Recovery scans your Trash for an item matching the recorded name (handles Finder's "Item 2" disambiguation) and moves it back to its original path.

Global Hotkeys

Two system-wide hotkeys, both rebindable in Settings → General.

  • ⌘⇧Space — global launcher. Files, apps, calculator, clipboard, web search, AI suggestions when on.
  • ⌃⇧Space — bring the Seek window forward, or open one if you closed it.

Click the recorder in Settings, press the combo you want, Seek re-installs it live. Press Esc to cancel. Either hotkey can be disabled independently if you've already given it to Raycast or Alfred.

AI

Optional. Off by default. When you turn it on (Settings → AI), pick one provider:

  • Local — Ollama / llama.cpp auto-detected; no key needed.
  • OpenAI-compatible — any /v1/chat/completions endpoint with your API key.
  • Anthropic — your Claude API key.
  • AWS Bedrock — your ~/.aws/credentials profile + region.

Once connected, Seek surfaces AI in three places: the launcher (intent → action), the diff sheet ("Summarise diff"), and the commit sheet ("Suggest commit message"). All read-only. See the AI page for the safety contract.

Sync

Seek's folder sync supports both one-way and two-way syncs with a dry-run preview. It works between any two locations Seek can browse — local, SFTP, S3, WebDAV (FTP and SMB land alongside their drivers).

The transfer queue handles the actual copying: pause, resume, retry, throttle, parallel jobs.

Keyboard Shortcuts

ShortcutAction
⌘⇧SpaceGlobal launcher (from anywhere)
⌘LFocus address bar
⌘⇧GGo to path…
⌘KCommand palette
⌘TNew tab
⌘WClose tab
⌘⇧TReopen last closed tab
⌘1⌘4Set pane count
⌥⌘IToggle inspector
⌥⌘SToggle sidebar
F5Copy to other pane (when 2+ panes are visible)
F6Move to other pane (when 2+ panes are visible)
⌘X / ⌘C / ⌘VCut / Copy / Paste
⌘ASelect all in active folder
⌘DDuplicate selection
⌘⌫Move selection to Trash
⌘⌃NNew folder with selection inside
⌘⇧.Toggle hidden files
⌘⇧]Clipboard history
⌘⌥QOpen transfer queue panel
ReturnRename (Finder parity)
⌘↓Open selection
⌘↑Enclosing folder
SpaceQuick Look
BackspaceNavigate up

Every shortcut is rebindable in Preferences → Shortcuts.


Full docs — including a complete user guide, scripting reference, and protocol-specific notes — will land alongside the v1 release.

An Ataiva product