The surfaces

v—preview#

v turns the right pane into a preview that follows the left pane's cursor—walk your files with j/k and the preview keeps up. The right pane shows a VIEW chip and says so: follows the left pane's cursor. Focus locks to the left pane while previewing; v again or esc puts the right pane back the way it was.

Preview behavior reflects where a file lives. Local files get the full treatment—text, and Quick Look for images, PDFs, and media. Remote text is fetched over the wire with a bounded read, so peeking at a config file on koan costs kilobytes, not the file. A remote binary stays an info card—pālana won't download megabytes just to render a thumbnail.

⌘`—the live shell#

For tasks outside the file manager, ⌘` opens a shell in the bottom panel: a terminal running plain ssh koan under your own config on a remote pane, or your login shell on a local one. One live session per host, kept warm until you quit the app. It's a full terminal, and the renderer underneath it is the same one that draws the plan panel and the enactment echo—one terminal engine behind every surface that speaks in commands.

The keyboard handover is explicit, and the footer always names who has it: the shell has the keyboard · ⌘` hands it to the panes · ⌘ shortcuts still work. While the shell holds the keyboard, every key reaches it — including esc, because vim needs it—and ⌘` is the way back. A shell that ends tells you, and how to resume: shell on koan ended—⌘` starts a new one.

The plain backtick ` is the smaller sibling: it engages the terminal panel's tool reads—the read-only strip where d z s p drop df -h, zfs list, zpool status, and zpool list from the focused host straight into the transcript. Questions, not mutations—nothing there needs a plan.

*—favorites#

8 stars the directory under the cursor; ⌘8 stars the directory you're standing in; * opens the favorites panel. Its footer is its manual: esc closes · 8 stars · * opens.

Favorites come in two scopes. A star is host-bound by default—koan's paths belong to koan. Promote one to global and it rides every host's menu: the pin glyph toggles it, or ⇧↑/⇧↓ from the keyboard — promote to global—visible on all hosts. The panel walks like everything else (j/k/l/h, ⏎ jumps), undoes with ⌘Z, and its three-arrow header picks which pane a jump lands in: left, both, or right.

⌘,—settings#

Four settings sections, in the app and mirrored in Apple's Settings scene.

Hosts. Your ssh config, as a surface: add a host (the form shows the exact block it will write), remove one (it shows the block it will strip), hide one from the menus without touching its block. The hide is a # palana: hide comment in the file; typed addresses still work. A backup of your config is written beside it before every change, and View config shows the file read-only whenever you want the raw truth.

Transfers. skip .DS_Store and skip AppleDouble files (._*) keep Mac droppings out of your servers—they become --exclude flags you can read in every rsync plan. A free-form more flags field appends anything else (say, --checksum); the caption states the floor that's always there: always on: -a, --partial resume · progress when the rsync speaks it. And ask before sending saved edits back governs the round trip.

Workbench. The destroy switch—zfs destroy asks you to type it, on by default: on: the word destroy arms the verb · off: Enter shows the plan directly. And the ZFS mount & unmount block: the one narrow sudoers line that unlocks those two verbs, prefilled with the host's login when your config names it, with a copy button. What the line grants and why it's shaped that way: the mount grant.

Appearance. System, Light, or Dark—System follows the Mac; Light and Dark override it. This site does the same, in the corner of the nav.

⌘+ ⌘− ⌘0—one master zoom#

One factor sizes the panes, plan panel, terminal, and floating panels together, from 0.8× to 1.6×, and is remembered across launches. ⌘0 resets it. There are no per-surface font settings.

⇧⌘L—the operations log#

Every enacted run—never mere gathering—appends to a plain text file, operations.log, in pālana's Application Support folder: a dated header naming the verb and the route, then the commands and their output, the same lines the panel echoed. ⇧⌘L doesn't open a viewer—it points the focused pane at the log and lands the cursor on it, because you already have a file manager in front of you. Your history is a plain file, greppable like everything else you own.