Inspector Panel
The inspector is a right-column panel (or a floating overlay in compact mode) that previews files referenced from chat or Projects. It plays audio, video, and images, renders PDFs, and surfaces EXIF or audio metadata when available.
The inspector exists so you do not have to leave the desktop to look at the files an agent works with.
What the inspector is for
When an agent or skill returns a file path, clicking the link opens the file in the inspector instead of bouncing you out to the system viewer. Files dragged from the Projects tab open the same way. The inspector is layout-aware — it embeds as a 300 px right column in workspace mode and floats as an overlay in compact mode.
Supported file types
| Category | Extensions | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Audio | mp3, flac, wav, opus, m4a | Cover art, artist, title, duration |
| Video | mp4, mkv, webm, mov | Codec and duration metadata |
| Image | jpg, png, webp, gif, heic | EXIF when present |
| Native renderer | ||
| Text / code | txt, md, source files | Syntax-highlighted preview |
| Unknown | * | Falls back to “open with system default” |
Range-request streaming
The inspector does not load whole files into memory. Local files are streamed on demand with byte-range support, so seeking in a 4 GB video is instant — the inspector reads only the bytes you actually scrub to, never the whole file.
On-demand byte-range streaming is what makes scrubbing in long media files smooth.
Document metadata extraction
The inspector extracts metadata per file type — EXIF for images, artist/title/cover art for audio, codec and duration for video. Cover art is capped at 5 MB, and metadata extraction is sandboxed so a malformed file cannot crash the inspector.
A malformed audio file can fail metadata extraction. If the inspector reports an error on a specific file, that file is the cause — the inspector surfaces a graceful error rather than hanging.
Cover art
The audio extractor returns the embedded cover art image as bytes; the inspector decodes it and shows it next to the metadata. If multiple images are embedded (front, back, booklet), an index picker lets you switch between them.
Remote files in the inspector
A cmdop://machine/<id>/<path> URI from the Projects sidebar opens the inspector in remote mode — the file streams over the existing connection to that machine, and metadata extraction happens on the remote side, not locally. This means viewing a 1 GB video on a remote machine does not pull the whole file across the wire — only the bytes you actually scrub through.
File-link parsing in chat
The chat shows file:// links inline; clicking one routes through the file-link parser, which resolves the path and opens the inspector. There is no extra round trip — the click itself is the open trigger.
Cmdop