All notable changes to this project are documented in this file.

The format is based on Keep a Changelog, and this project adheres to Semantic Versioning.

• Added Tab to switch between files and folders in Fuzzy Find without clearing your query. (#296)
• Added [preview] tab_width to configure tab width in text and code previews (1–16 columns, default 4). (#292)

• Improved Sixel preview speed and color quality.

• Improved --help with cleaner formatting, terminal colors, and a link to the CLI documentation.

• Fixed Sixel previews disappearing in tmux.

• Fixed -h and --help for shell integration commands.

• Added Duplicate Finder to find files with identical contents, regardless of name, and safely trash, delete, rename, open, or reveal them. (#258)
• Added arm64 Linux release archives and Debian package assets, including publishing through the official apt repository.
• Added a configurable toggle_preview (V) shortcut to show or hide the preview pane. (#251)
• Added a configurable fullscreen_preview (P) shortcut to temporarily expand the preview pane.
• Added bulk archive extraction for selected archives. (#241)
• Added image preview support inside Zellij 0.45+ when using Kitty, Ghostty, or WezTerm. (#85)
• Added a Nord example theme. (#270)
• Added invoking-user-aware sudo and doas sessions on Unix: elio retains elevated filesystem access while using the invoking user's config, Places, shell, applications, editor, zoxide, and Trash/Restore; direct-root sessions continue using root's state.
• Added --config FILE and --theme FILE to override the default configuration and theme paths. (#274)

• Changed preview scroll defaults from [ / ] to Shift+arrows; H/J/K/L remain unchanged.
• Changed chooser-mode double-clicks to enter folders and choose files.

• Fixed license icons in archive previews.
• Fixed image previews bleeding through archive creation popups in transparent themes.
• Fixed image previews disappearing after returning from actions that suspend and restore the TUI.
• Fixed pasted text being handled as normal keystrokes.
• Fixed stretched image previews in Kitty graphics environments that do not preserve placeholder aspect ratios. (#267)
• Fixed restoring files on macOS when Trash renamed them to avoid name collisions.
• Fixed SQLite previews creating missing -wal and -shm sidecar files for WAL-mode databases. (#278)

• Fixed 32-bit builds by avoiding usize overflow in compact directory count formatting.

• Switched syntax highlighting to syntect's pure-Rust regex backend, removing the native Oniguruma dependency.

• Added .zip, .7z, .tar, .tar.gz/.tgz, .tar.xz/.txz, and .tar.bz2/.tbz2/.tbz archive creation for the focused item or current selection, with editable archive names, background progress, cancellation, and a configurable create_archive (C) shortcut. (#215)
• Added password protection for .zip and .7z archive creation. (#215)
• Added safe symlink preservation for .zip, .7z, and .tar archive creation and extraction.
• Added a show/hide control to encrypted archive password prompts.
• Added YAML frontmatter rendering to Markdown previews and recognized Quarto .qmd files as Markdown. (#223)
• Added syntax-highlighted previews for Astro .astro files.
• Added file type labels and icons for subtitle files and Coccinelle semantic patches, including diff-style previews for .cocci files.
• Added Jupyter notebook JSON previews and notebook icons.
• Added default theme icons for Angular project files, CSV/TSV tables, object files, libraries, and WebAssembly modules.
• Added Kitty 0.47+ drag-and-drop support for dropping items into elio and dragging items out, with themed drag previews.
• Added configurable open rules for choosing preferred openers by file type, extension, and platform, including terminal apps such as $EDITOR without changing system defaults. (#232)
• Added R / Shift+F2 to rename selected files in your editor (#235).

• Made create and bulk rename overlays show more rows before scrolling, adapt better on short terminals, and use consistent scrollbar styling.
• Dimmed help overlay key separators (/) and removed the bottom close hint.
• Improved default and example theme icons for .gitkeep, Makefile variants, Kyuafile, config directories, subtitle files, and diff/patch previews.
• Improved Blush Light and Default Light focus contrast and refreshed the bundled theme screenshots.
• Support ~/.config/elio for config and theme files on macOS. (#240)

• Fixed Fuzzy Find result icons for nested files that use full-name rules, such as LICENSE.md.
• Fixed .in templates such as Makefile.in, Kyuafile.in, and shell completion templates being shown as plain files.
• Fixed extensionless shell scripts with SPDX headers being shown as license files.
• Fixed Copy to clipboard inside tmux when tmux blocks OSC52 clipboard escape sequences.

• Added native archive extraction for focused .zip, .7z, .tar, .tar.gz/.tgz, .tar.xz/.txz, .tar.bz2/.tbz2/.tbz, and .tar.zst/.tzst files, with a configurable extract_archive (e) shortcut, background progress, cancellation, unique sibling destination folders, and password prompts for encrypted .7z and .zip archives. (#90)
• Added RAR extraction through the external 7-Zip backend (7z, 7zz, or 7za), including password prompts for encrypted RAR5 archives and staged extraction safety checks. (#90)
• Added a progress_bar theme palette color for active background operation chips, used by archive extraction progress.
• Made Go To entries configurable, allowing built-ins to be changed and custom entries to be added. (#166)
• Added / to filter the current directory's entries. (#201)

• Prefer native archive listing for .7z, .tar.xz, .tar.bz2, and .tar.zst previews before falling back to external archive tools, and keep encrypted .7z previews visible with a password-required notice. (#90)
• Places now switches to an icon-only rail in narrow windows before labels become overly truncated. (#184)
• Changed Open With to keep $VISUAL and $EDITOR labels on matching MIME-associated editors and place them directly below the system default association. (#199)
• Added a scrollbar to Fuzzy Find and made more room for results by removing footer hints.

• Fixed --chooser-file - and /dev/stdout output when piped to tools such as sed or awk, keeping terminal UI escape sequences out of machine-readable chooser output. (#186)
• Fixed video thumbnails not appearing for the first file when starting elio inside a video folder. (#195)
• Fixed inline video preview redraws that could leave only partial metadata visible after navigating between videos.
• Fixed the Help overlay in small windows and with large terminal fonts so overflowing controls remain readable and scrollable.
• Fixed editing very long names in rename, create, bulk rename, fuzzy find, and / filters.

• Added highlighted previews and icons for LaTeX, TeX, and BibTeX files (.tex, .ltx, .sty, .cls, .bib).
• Show the current git branch in the footer while browsing repositories, with a * marker for local changes. (#157)
• Made Open With work on directories too, using the same app picker and system directory handlers. (#157)
• Added --chooser-file FILE [PATH] to run elio as a file chooser, writing the confirmed selection as absolute paths, one per line, to FILE or stdout with -; cancel exits silently with a nonzero status. (#153)
• Added persistent multi-path selection across directories, allowing chooser confirmation and bulk actions to use selected paths from multiple folders.
• elio <path> now accepts file paths as well as directories, opening the parent directory and focusing the file entry, including hidden files, file symlinks, and broken symlinks.
• Added configurable symlink_absolute (-) and symlink_relative (_) shortcuts for creating absolute or relative symlinks from yanked items in the current directory. (#159)
• Added Del as a default trash shortcut and Shift+Del as a default permanent-delete shortcut; [keys] now accepts delete / del as named key values. (#162)

• Updated shell integration scripts to pass --chooser-file invocations directly to elio, so chooser mode does not change the parent shell directory. Re-run elio shell install after upgrading to refresh existing shell integration.
• Improved the Open With menu with keyboard navigation, scrolling, and an overflow scrollbar for long app lists.
• Improved narrow browser pane resizing so Places gives up space sooner, preview remains useful longer, and stacked preview layouts behave more consistently.
• Simplified Create and Help overlay hints.

• Blocked nested selections and prevented pasting a folder into itself.
• Fixed Caps Lock letter input when terminals report Caps Lock separately from the character.
• Fixed image previews inside tmux when stale Alacritty/Kitty markers from the tmux server environment hid the active supported terminal.
• Fixed several terminal/UI freeze cases around large image-preview output, focus changes, keyboard enhancement probing, and slow autofs/network mounts.
• Fixed image and PDF preview redraws during resize bursts, with resize settling tuned separately for tmux and non-tmux terminals.
• Fixed the active sidebar item highlight in the terminal ANSI and transparent example themes.
• Fixed UI freezes when selecting all items in very large folders.
• Fixed Linux/BSD Open With (O) behavior by reporting missing handlers accurately, showing the app used for direct single-app launches, and offering $VISUAL or $EDITOR in the current terminal for text/code files when the editor is not registered as a desktop app; o / Enter uses the same editor fallback only when no desktop handler is available. (#168)
• Fixed folder item counts lagging behind during fast mouse-wheel navigation.
• Improved status bar behavior in narrow terminals by prioritizing focused item context, shortening open-file messages, and removing redundant idle hints. (#174)

• Added restore_from_trash and function-key bindings such as F2, letting restore and rename be configured separately while keeping the default r restore behavior in Trash and r/F2 rename behavior elsewhere.
• Added support for assigning multiple bindings to each configurable [keys] action, while keeping existing single-string key config compatible.
• Added configurable navigation bindings for nav_left, nav_down, nav_up, and nav_right, including named arrow keys.
• Added open_or_enter as a configurable binding for the existing Enter behavior: entering folders or opening files. (#141)
• Added [] support for unbinding configurable [keys] actions.
• Added support for modifier [keys] bindings such as ctrl+o, alt+o, and shift+right.
• Added named [keys] values for space, tab, backtab / shift+tab, backspace, pageup, pagedown, home, and end.
• Added configurable browser control bindings for go_to, toggle_selection, cycle_places_next, cycle_places_previous, go_parent, page_up, page_down, jump_first, and jump_last.
• Added configurable [keys] bindings for quit_without_cd, search_files, select_all, history_back, and history_forward, plus [ / ] defaults for the existing scroll_preview_up / scroll_preview_down actions.
• Added a configurable D (delete_permanently) shortcut for permanently deleting selected entries without first opening Trash. (#140)

• Updated the help overlay to reflect the new configurable bindings and clearer quit-without-cd wording.
• Warn when [keys] contains unknown action names, while still applying valid key bindings.

• Added a terminal-ansi theme example and support for terminal ANSI colors in theme.toml. (#84)
• Added --cwd-file and installable bash, zsh, fish, and Nushell integration for changing the parent shell directory to elio's final directory on quit, including quit-without-cd, current-shell detection, zsh ZDOTDIR support, symlink-aware config updates, and a matching uninstall command. (#69, #129)

• Simplified directory preview headers by hiding the Contents label. (#125)
• Updated the transparent theme example to make popups and path surfaces fully transparent, and removed comments from example themes.

• Improved mouse double-click behavior when a selection is active.
• Fixed o / Enter on Linux and BSD to open default terminal-based apps in the current terminal when opening a single file instead of a separate terminal window. (#134)
• Updated tar from 0.4.45 to 0.4.46 to address upstream advisory GHSA-3cv2-h65g-fgmm. (#138)
• Improved popup rendering over image previews, preventing preview content from showing through transparent overlay cells across Kitty/Ghostty, WezTerm/iTerm2, Foot, and Windows Terminal.
• Fixed WezTerm and iTerm2 inline image previews during terminal resize, keeping previews and popups correctly layered.

• Added ! to open the user's shell in the current folder and return to elio when the shell exits. (#112)
• Added bulk opening for selected items: Enter and o now open the current selection instead of only the focused row. (#111)
• Added symlink-aware rendering in the file browser, directory previews, and Places, with inline -> target details, dedicated icons for symlinked folders and broken links, and a broken-link preview. Symlinked files keep their normal file-type appearance.
• Added themable symlink_directory and broken_symlink classes, whose default colors track the directory class color and preview.code.invalid unless explicitly overridden.

• Fixed quit stalls after browsing special files or large archives by avoiding blocking special-file reads, canceling archive listing commands, and sending oversized ZIP/CBZ archives through the bounded external listing path. (#121)
• Improved fuzzy search for large directory trees: matches now appear while scanning continues, stale scans are canceled automatically, the scan cap is much higher, and the overlay reports scan limit reached when the cap is hit.
• Fixed fuzzy search so symlinked folders, symlinked files, and broken symlinks appear as searchable entries. Linked directories are listed but not descended into.
• Fixed Tab / Shift+Tab cycling and the active highlight for symlinked Places entries, which previously reset to Home after opening the symlink target. (#109)

• Added Linux desktop entry metadata and hicolor application icons for packaged installs, allowing desktop launchers to discover elio as a terminal file manager. (#67)
• Added amd64 Debian package assets and official apt repository publishing for Debian/Ubuntu installs, including the Linux desktop entry and hicolor application icons in the package.

• Added a configurable z shortcut for jumping to directories with zoxide query -i, excluding the current directory from the picker and reporting missing zoxide, empty history, or history containing only the current directory clearly. (#103)
• Added "none" (alias: "transparent") as accepted color values in theme.toml, resetting foreground or background colors to the terminal default. For background fields, this lets transparent terminals show through. See examples/themes/transparent/theme.toml. (#86)
• Added a chip_text palette field that controls the foreground of toolbar status chips (yank, cut, selected, trash, restore). Defaults to #0c0c0c on all themes; previously this color was reused from chrome. (#86)

• Improved chip text contrast on the bundled light themes (default-light, blush-light) as a side effect of the new chip_text palette field — chips now use a dark default fg instead of the theme's light chrome color. (#86)
• Improved Kitty and Ghostty image preview auto-detection inside tmux when tmux hides the usual terminal environment markers. (#70)

• Auto-enable tmux allow-passthrough for image previews in supported terminals, so users no longer need to configure it manually.
• Fixed Sixel preview support inside tmux, including Foot and Windows Terminal detection from tmux client/session environment. Windows Terminal now uses tmux's native Sixel path to avoid corrupted alternate-screen rendering in WSL. (#70)
• Fixed undersized Windows Terminal Sixel previews on WSL outside tmux by querying the terminal cell pixel size before falling back to default cell dimensions.
• Fixed iTerm inline preview transport and placement inside tmux, including correct pane-relative positioning and compact cached payloads for large JPEG/GIF previews that could otherwise lag or disappear. (#70)
• Fixed Kitty direct-placement preview transport and placement inside tmux for Konsole and Warp. (#70)

• Added an optional startup directory argument, so elio <directory> opens that directory and invalid or non-directory paths return a clear error.
• Added keyboard-driven preview scrolling that mirrors [ / ]: Shift+K / Shift+J (configurable) step pages on PDF, comic, and EPUB previews and otherwise scroll the preview up / down. [ / ] now also scrolls text/code/log previews while keeping its page-step behavior on paged previews. (#79)
• Added a dedicated Preview section to the help overlay (?) listing the new vertical scroll keys, [ / ] page-stepping, and the horizontal scroll keys, and rebalanced the overlay columns so both sides end at the same height.

• Changed the default horizontal preview scroll bindings from < / > to Shift+H / Shift+L so all four preview scroll directions share a consistent vim-style modifier pattern. Existing scroll_preview_left / scroll_preview_right overrides in config.toml continue to work unchanged.

• Fixed Linux/BSD default-app dispatch and Open With MIME detection to prefer GLib's MIME resolution before falling back to xdg-open or xdg-mime, keeping system default launches aligned with desktop MIME associations. (#77)
• Fixed Warp inline image and PDF previews by using Kitty direct placement instead of Kitty Unicode placeholders. (#75)
• Fixed tmux relaying of Kitty Graphics preview sequences so inline image and PDF previews can render inside tmux when KittyGraphics is selected and allow-passthrough is enabled. Some tmux setups may still require preserved terminal markers or ELIO_IMAGE_PREVIEWS=1. (#74, #70)

• Added Konsole inline image preview support with a dedicated backend and conservative popup clearing to avoid preview artifacts.

• Fixed cargo install elio from crates.io by upgrading lofty from the yanked 0.23 series to 0.24. Thanks @jprobichaud for catching this in #66.

• Added QML source file support with syntax-highlighted code previews.
• Added a dedicated QML file icon in the built-in browser theme.
• Added metadata previews for TrueType, OpenType, WOFF, and WOFF2 font files, replacing the generic binary fallback.

• Improved large-directory navigation responsiveness by deferring browser directory counts and recursive directory totals until navigation settles, canceling stale directory reload work, and scaling polling reload cadence with directory size.

• Fixed compact file browser rows so folder item counts and file sizes stay visually aligned across singular/plural counts and differing size units.
• Fixed browser license icons so canonical license files, SPDX-marked text files, and standalone license documents keep the license appearance during fast-path row rendering.
• Fixed truncated directory previews so sampled entry counts are no longer shown as exact totals before background directory stats finish loading.

• Added RAR archive previews using the existing external archive listing backends, with unrar as an additional fallback when available.
• Added non-image comic archive previews for CBZ and CBR files, using embedded XML/comment metadata or conservative structured-name fallbacks instead of showing an empty pane.
• Added MOBI and AZW3 ebook classification, book icons, native metadata previews, and cover image previews for Kindle ebook files.

• Improved fuzzy search indexing and filtering responsiveness for large directory trees.
• Simplified document metadata previews by keeping author, dates, application, stats, and extra metadata fields in the Details section.
• Made MOBI and AZW3 cover previews larger while preserving room for document details.
• Made full-height EPUB image sections advance on preview scroll without first scrolling hidden context lines.
• Kept RAR archive loading previews silent while archive contents are inspected in the background.
• Documented fuzzy search scope, hidden-file handling, pruning, refresh behavior, and large-tree caps.
• Documented Trash behavior across Linux, BSD, macOS, and Windows.
• Prefer gio trash on Linux before falling back to the Freedesktop Trash layout for desktop-compatible trashing.

• Fixed fuzzy search reusing stale indexes after directory reloads, so pasted, cut, deleted, or newly created entries are reflected after filesystem changes.
• Fixed Freedesktop Trash entries with collision-suffixed storage names, such as photo.jpg.2, so they display, preview, open, and restore using their original .trashinfo names.
• Fixed stacked browser layouts so the Preview pane expands in tall narrow terminals and respects configured Files/Preview pane weights.
• Fixed metadata previews for large ZIP-based office documents, including PPTX, PPTM, ODP, DOCX, XLSX, and Pages files.
• Clarified document metadata preview sections by replacing the repeated Document body heading with Details and keeping People for author fields.
• Fixed fixed-layout EPUB pages without extractable text so the preview shows page and book context instead of an empty pane.
• Clarified media and binary metadata previews by using Details instead of repeating Video, Audio, Image, or Binary as the first body section.
• Clarified archive metadata previews by using Details instead of Summary, Image, or Torrent for the first body section.
• Clarified SQLite database previews by using Details for the first metadata section.

• Added --help/-h and --version/-V CLI flags.
• Added release packaging automation for AUR, Fedora COPR, and Homebrew, including Homebrew bottle publishing.

• Initial public release of elio.
• Three-pane interface with dedicated Places, Files, and Preview columns.
• Rich preview support for text, code, structured data, documents, archives, media, directories, and binary metadata.
• Inline image previews for supported terminals through Kitty Graphics, iTerm2 Inline, and Sixel backends.
• Keyboard and mouse navigation, list and grid views, and fuzzy search for efficient browsing.
• Configurable Places, theme overrides, pane layout settings, and browser key bindings.
• Quick actions including Go-to, Open With, clipboard copy, and system opener integration.
• Trash and restore support for safer file management workflows.
• Optional external-tool integrations such as Poppler, ffmpeg, ffprobe, resvg, and 7-Zip for richer previews and metadata.