075: The files view is the editor plugin's own UI

Status: accepted, 8 November 2026. The recursive initial tree and left-hand placement are superseded by 077. Supersedes the view-construction sentence of 074.

Context

074 took the behaviour of bb-plugin-files-editor and built a different view from bb-box’s components. That was the wrong cut. The view should look and work like that plugin. The reading and writing stay as 074 decided: the box user’s own files, through the box’s command transport.

Decision

Ported as they are, with the plugin’s comments removed:

• The explorer, the editor tabs, the file view, the find bar, quick open, the search results, the file glyphs, the workspace shell and the tab state.
• The helpers those need for the tree, for find in a file, for Markdown, and for the kind of a file.
• The layout, the spacing, the tabs, the search toggles, quick open, the find bar, Preview, Read and Edit, and the shortcuts: Ctrl or Command with P, with F, with Shift and F, and with S, and Escape. Alt with C, W or R still toggles match case, whole word and a regular expression.

Changed:

• The data source. The plugin’s workspace calls are the box file calls from 074. The tree is files.names for the folder in the path bar. Opening is files.read. A file past the size limit can show its first 256 KB with files.readRange, and that slice cannot be saved. Saving is files.write with the hash guard. Search is files.search. 076 adds create, rename and delete to the view. This record had left them off the view, because the plugin has no such buttons.
• The workspace picker is a path bar. It opens at the box user’s home. There is no project picker and no worktree picker. The folder button returns home. The up arrow opens the folder above.
• It still opens from the Files button on the box’s row, on its page, and in the Files tab.
• Glyph colours use BB’s theme tokens: foreground, warning text, destructive text, success, subtle foreground and muted foreground. The plugin’s palette classes are not used.
• Names that start with a dot stay hidden until the eye is selected. The plugin showed them at first.
• The right-click menu on a tab is drawn by the panel. bb-box does not ship the context-menu package the plugin uses.
• BB’s own icon is used. The plugin’s copies of button, input, dialog, checkbox and overlay were not needed: this view’s controls are the same plain buttons the plugin draws, and bb-box already has the icon.
• The path handed to BB’s source view still ends in the real file name. A version sits in the directory in front of that name, so a reload shows the new text, and the colours still see the extension.

Consequences

• 074 still decides the transport, the limits, the hash guard, the search corpus, device boxes, and what a failure may say. A listing of names does not count as that searchable copy: search keeps reading the box until the copy is warm.
• The save checks the file’s hash and then writes through the file. The short window from that check until the write completes is accepted, as in common editors, since a writer that does not coordinate can always land in it.
• There is no agent tool for the files calls. A call from another plugin is refused. They open the same boxes as the terminal.
• The plugin’s copyright and permission notice on the Third-party software page covers this port.
• A person creates, renames or deletes from the view, as 076 decides. An agent still does it with box_run.