preview-mode

preview-mode: marks a pane showing a picker preview — an isolated, read-only projection that never touches the buffer you came from.

Marks a pane that is showing a picker preview — the file under the cursor in :picker files, rendered in place so you can see what you're about to open.

The point of the mode is isolation. A preview is a read-only projection: it never mutates the buffer the pane is committed to, never touches the editor's active-buffer state, and never disturbs that buffer's options or mode stack. Dismiss the picker and the pane snaps back with nothing to undo, because nothing was swapped out.

That matters because previewing is incidental — you're scrolling a list, not deciding to open anything yet. A preview that left traces would make browsing a picker destructive.

Behaviour worth knowing

• Read-only, and the buffer is ephemeral — it is garbage-collected when the preview ends rather than accumulating in :ls.
• Never runs the expensive open path. A preview does not attach a language server or run the full parse; that work waits until you actually open the file.

Options

ReadOnly = true, plus the ephemeral buffer flag so the preview is garbage-collected rather than kept.

Keybindings

None. The keys you press while previewing belong to the picker — see picker.

See also

• picker — the pickers that preview.