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The File Explorer lets admins browse the project context folder directly from nao chat settings and inspect file contents in read-only mode. It’s the fastest way to confirm what’s actually in the context the agent is reading from - without SSHing into the host or pulling the repo locally.
File Explorer is admin-only and does not allow editing files from the UI. To change context files, edit them in your repo and re-sync.

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Access File Explorer

  1. Open the nao chat admin panel.
  2. Go to Settings -> File Explorer.
  3. Use the left panel to browse folders and files.
  4. Click any file to open its content in the viewer on the right.

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Layout

The page is split into two resizable panels:
  • Left panel - file tree of the project context folder, with a search input at the top.
  • Right panel - read-only code viewer for the currently selected file.
Drag the separator between the two panels to give more room to whichever side you need. The split is preserved while you navigate.

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What You Can Do

  • Browse the full context folder tree, expanding and collapsing directories.
  • Search the tree by filename - matches filter the tree in place across the entire context.
  • Click any file to open it in the viewer with syntax highlighting (the language is detected automatically from the file extension).
  • Refresh the tree to pick up files that were just synced or added on disk.
  • Switch between light and dark themes - the code viewer follows your nao theme setting (including system mode), so it always matches the rest of the UI.
The viewer uses the same Monaco editor that powers the nao IDE, so SQL, Python, JSON, YAML, Markdown, CSV and the other common context formats render with proper highlighting.

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Important Behavior

  • Hidden and ignored paths follow your project ignore rules, including any .naoignore patterns and the standard excluded directories.
  • File content reads are capped at 1 MB per file. Larger files can still be listed in the tree but will not load in the viewer - use the CLI or your repo for those.
  • All paths are validated server-side so the explorer cannot be used to read files outside the configured context folder.
  • The viewer is read-only and intended for inspection and debugging, not authoring.
What’s Next?

Admin Setup

Configure users, models, integrations, and agent behavior

Monitoring

Track usage, costs, feedback, and chat replay