Default Behaviors
Phials makes a lot of small decisions for you: what a new tab opens to, how a folder is sorted before you touch it, what happens when you double-click a file, and how video plays in the preview. This page collects those defaults and where to change them.
Most live in Settings → General, with a few under Settings → Files → Media.
New tabs
Under Settings → General → Startup:
- New Tab Behavior: open new tabs at a default directory, or duplicate the current tab so a new tab starts where you already are.
- Default Directory: the folder new tabs open to when you’re not duplicating. Leave it empty to use your home folder.
See Tabs for working with tabs.
Folder defaults
Under Settings → General → Defaults. These apply to folders that don’t have their own saved layout yet. Once you change the view, sort, filters, grouping, or size in a folder, that folder remembers your choice and these defaults step aside. (Saved views in a Vial are always separate.)
- Explorer View Mode: the starting view mode (Details, Thumbnails, and so on).
- Default grid item size: the fallback tile size for grid layouts.
- Default primary sort and sort order: how files are ordered (name, size, created, modified, type, extension; ascending or descending).
- Default group by: group rows by extension, type, created, or modified, or leave them ungrouped.
- Default filter scope: show just the current folder, or flatten subfolders into one list.
- Default: show files: start with files visible, or show folders only.
For doing this per folder instead of globally, see Sorting, Filtering & Grouping and Saved Views.
What double-click does
When you double-click in the file list, Phials chooses one of:
- Open a preview tab: for file types with a rich preview (images, video, Markdown, text and code, spreadsheets, databases, 3D models, and more), Phials opens the large preview in a center tab.
- Play in the audio player: common audio files (MP3, WAV, FLAC, AAC, M4A, OGG) start playing in the floating player at the bottom of the window instead of opening a tab.
- Hand off to your system: anything without a rich preview opens in whatever app your operating system uses for that type.
Double-clicking a folder always moves into it.
In Gallery view, pressing Enter on the selected file does the same thing as a double-click.
You can force a specific extension to always open as a preview or always open in your system app. There isn’t a settings screen for this yet. A future Settings → Previews area will add it.
Video playback
Under Settings → Files → Media, the Video Playback options control how a selected video behaves in the preview sidebar (the larger preview tab has its own controls):
- Autoplay (on by default): a selected video starts playing automatically, muted, as you skim files.
- Loop (on by default): the clip repeats while it stays selected.
Phials includes the media tooling it needs for video thumbnails and playback, so these work out of the box. See Video and File & Metadata Caches for thumbnails.