Browsing your context files

Every concept ContextCake serves came from a file somewhere. Knowledge → Files is the navigator over those files: a tree per source, the document rendered beside it, and a link in both directions between a file and the concept it becomes.

The Web Demo has the same navigator, read-only, over the three-layer demo bundle — the tree, the documents, and the file ⇄ concept links, with no Save.

From a source to its files

In Sources, select a source. Two rows in the panel are worth reading before you open anything: Files is how many files that source holds, and Location is the folder it reads. Browse files opens the navigator scoped to it.

Two other ways in:

• Knowledge → Files (⇧⌘F) shows every source at once.
• The command palette (⌘K) carries one Browse files in <source> entry per source.

The tree

Each source is a root row with its file count and its layer colour; folders sit under it, closed, each with the number of files in its subtree. A vault of a few thousand notes therefore opens as a short list of folders rather than a wall of file names — expand only the part you care about. Only the rows on screen exist in the page, so the tree costs the same at 30 files as at 3,000.

It is a keyboard tree:

Key	Does
↑ ↓	Move between visible rows
→	Open a folder, then step into it
←	Close a folder, or jump to its parent
Home End	First / last row
Enter	Open a file, or toggle a folder

The top-bar search box filters by file name and path, and opens every folder that still holds a match — a filtered tree is no use closed. That is a starting point, not a lock: ← and a click still close a folder while the filter is on, and it stays closed when you clear the search. If a source holds more files than the scan limit allows, the navigator says so at the top of the tree and tells you where to raise it (Settings → Indexing).

Scoping to one source

Arriving from Browse files scopes the tree to that source: a chip names it, with the file count and the folder underneath. Clear the chip to see every source again. Scoping to a source that keeps nothing on this machine says which kind of source it is instead of showing an empty folder — see Sources with no files to browse.

Deep links

The navigator is addressable, and the URL updates as you browse:

• #/files — the whole tree
• #/files/team — scoped to the team source
• #/files/team/runbooks/deploy.md — that file open, its folders revealed

The second segment is the path inside the source, so a name with a space or a note six folders deep both survive the round trip. This is the link to paste into a ticket when you want a colleague to look at the same document.

Reading and editing

Markdown opens rendered. The Raw tab shows the file exactly as written — frontmatter, {#anchor} heading attributes and all — and that tab is the editor.

Edit, then Save (⌘S). ContextCake writes the file and re-resolves the cascade, so Concepts, Cascade and Discrepancies agree with what you just typed rather than with what was there when the app started. Editing a section that another layer disagrees with is one way to settle a conflict; the merge resolver is the other.

Some limits are deliberate:

• Saving is refused if the file changed on disk after you opened it. Reopen it and merge — nothing is overwritten in the meantime.
• This view only ever overwrites files that already exist, and only inside a source’s own folder. It creates nothing and deletes nothing.
• Images and PDFs preview instead of opening for edit. A text file above the indexer’s size cap opens read-only, because it is a file the cascade does not read either.
• Files in a cloned repository are editable, but the edit lives only in your clone — and a dirty clone can make the next Sync fail.

A file and the concept it becomes

An open document names the concept it resolves to, with that concept’s conflict count; click through to read the merged result in Concepts. Going the other way, every contributor listed on a concept has an Open file button that lands on the exact file in that layer.

The rule behind both links is simple: a concept id is the file’s path inside its source with the document extension removed, so runbooks/deploy.md in the team source is the concept runbooks/deploy — the same derivation the engine makes when it reads the layer.

Which extensions count depends on the kind of source: a ContextCake bundle reads .md, and a Markdown folder reads .md, .mdx, and .txt. Everything else in the folder — an image, a PDF, a .txt note sitting in an OKF bundle — is listed in the tree and has no concept behind it. Those files get no link rather than one that opens on an error.

Reveal in Finder

In the Mac app, the file header has Reveal in Finder, and a source’s panel has one for the folder itself. The app resolves the location from the source name and the path inside it and refuses anything that escapes that source’s folder, so a reveal can only ever land inside the folder you pointed it at. The browser build has no Finder, so the button is absent there rather than present and dead.

Repointing a source’s folder

Moved your notes? In Sources, open Rename / level / folder, edit Location, and save. ContextCake re-reads the new folder and leaves your other sources alone — you do not have to remove the source and add it back.

This is offered for folder-backed sources: a ContextCake bundle or a Markdown folder. A cloned repository’s folder is managed by Sync, and a GitHub-API or MCP source has no folder to move; for those, remove the source and add it again.

Sources with no files to browse

Two source kinds keep nothing on your machine and so never appear in the tree:

• A GitHub repository read over the API — indexed without a clone, so no file from it is stored locally.
• An MCP source — a remote graph ContextCake reads live and translates at read time. See Foreign MCP sources.

That absence is a healthy state, not a failure, and the navigator says so when you scope to one of them. Their content is in Knowledge → Concepts like everything else. A repository you cloned is the exception: the clone is a real folder on disk, so it does show up here.