File Shelf

A temporary holding area for files and folders, so you can collect items from many places and then move or copy them all at once.

What is the Shelf?
Why use the Shelf instead of copy-paste?
When to use it (3 real scenarios)
Opening the Shelf
Adding items
Working with items in the Shelf
Moving and copying to a destination
Capacity and limits
Persistence — what survives an app restart?
Auto-hide behavior
Settings
Keyboard shortcuts
FAQ
See also

What is the Shelf?

Think of the Shelf as a workshop bench. You walk around the shop picking parts off different racks, drop them on the bench as you find them, and when you have everything you need you carry the whole pile to where it belongs. No trips back and forth, no forgetting what you were doing, and no worrying that the pile will disappear if the phone rings.

In Span Finder, that bench is a slim panel on the right edge of the window. Drop any file or folder onto it — from any tab, any path, any drive. Keep browsing. When you reach the destination folder, click Move here or Copy here and the whole pile lands in one operation. The pile also survives app restarts, so you can start curating tonight and finish tomorrow.

The Shelf is deliberately quiet: when empty it slides off-screen entirely, and once you drop an item into it, it shrinks to a 36-pixel badge on the right edge until you hover over it. That way it never steals workspace from the folders you are actually browsing.

Why use the Shelf instead of copy-paste?

The obvious alternative is the clipboard — cut, navigate, paste. It works, but it hits a wall the moment your workflow gets even slightly non-linear.

	Clipboard (Cut/Copy + Paste)	Shelf
Items held at once	One batch	Up to 50, from any mix of folders
Visibility	Invisible — no way to see what is queued	Always visible (as a badge or full panel)
Pulling from many folders	Must paste between each pickup, or overwrite the clipboard	Drop, keep browsing, drop again
Reuse the same set	Lost after first paste	Stays until you clear it
Lock specific items	Not possible	Pin them — survives Move and Clear
Survives app restart	No	Yes (if “Save on exit” is on — default)
Drag as source	Limited	Drag items back out to any folder column

The short version: the clipboard is for one hop, the Shelf is for routes.

When to use it (3 real scenarios)

Scenario 1: Photo curation

You shot 500 photos on a trip and want to cherry-pick the best 30 into a Best/ folder for your album.

Open Pictures/Trip/2026/.
Scroll through the thumbnails. When you see a keeper, drag it to the right edge — the Shelf slides out to catch it. Drop and keep scrolling.
Multi-select and drag in batches when you hit an obvious run of good shots.
Need to check the RAW files in a sibling folder? Switch folders. The Shelf keeps everything you already collected.
When you are done, navigate to Pictures/Trip/2026/Best/.
Click Move here. All 30 photos land in one atomic operation.

Scenario 2: Code refactor — collecting files to relocate

You are reorganizing a project. Three component files in src/components/, one helper in src/utils/, and a stylesheet in src/styles/ all need to move into a new src/features/auth/ folder.

Open src/components/, Ctrl-click the three component files, drag them to the Shelf.
Open src/utils/, drag the helper over.
Open src/styles/, drag the stylesheet over.
Navigate to src/features/auth/ (creating it first if needed).
Click Move here. Five files from three folders, one click.

Because Span’s Move is undo-aware, if you change your mind, Ctrl+Z rolls the whole thing back.

Scenario 3: Receipt collection for tax season

Your receipts arrive all year as email attachments saved to Downloads/, screenshots in Pictures/, and PDFs in Documents/. Once a quarter you file them.

Navigate through each source folder picking out the receipts. Drag each to the Shelf as you find them.
Pin the “Receipt template.xlsx” — you refer to it often, so you want it to stick around even after the batch operation.
Navigate to Documents/Taxes/2026Q1/.
Click Copy here (you want a copy for the archive, not a move).
The pinned template stays on the Shelf for next quarter. Everything else copied over cleanly.

Opening the Shelf

The Shelf has three visual states:

State	Width	When
Hidden	0 px (off-screen)	Empty and not summoned
Collapsed	36 px badge showing item count	Has items, cursor away
Full	270 px panel	Summoned, or cursor hovering the collapsed badge

It auto-shows in three situations:

You drag a file near the right edge — The Shelf slides out (Yoink-style) to receive the drop.
You press the toggle shortcut (Ctrl+B by default) or trigger Add to Shelf (Ctrl+Shift+B) — The panel opens to full width.
The Shelf already has items — It stays as a 36-px badge until you hover over it, at which point it expands to full width. Move the cursor away and after ~500 ms it slinks back to badge.

When the Shelf is completely empty and you are not dragging anything, it hides off-screen entirely so it never eats workspace.

Tip: If you find the auto-collapse distracting while you work inside the Shelf, hold the cursor inside the panel — it only collapses when the pointer leaves. For a permanent toggle, use the close button (X) in the header to hide it entirely.

Adding items

There is no single “right” way to add items — Span accepts everything a normal file manager would.

Drag from a folder column to the Shelf. Works from Miller columns, Details view, and Icon view.
Drag from another application (another Explorer window, Visual Studio, Chrome downloads bar, etc.) onto the Shelf. Anything that exposes file paths via standard OS drag-drop works.
Multi-select then drag. Shift-click for range, Ctrl-click for individual selection. Whatever is selected when you start the drag comes along.
Ctrl+Shift+B on the current selection adds it to the Shelf without touching the mouse.

Adding an item that is already on the Shelf is a no-op — duplicates are silently skipped.

Working with items in the Shelf

Multi-select

The Shelf list behaves like any file list. Click to select one, Shift-click for a range, Ctrl-click to toggle individual items, or drag a rubber-band rectangle across the items to select multiple at once.

Drag items out

You can drag items from the Shelf to any folder column to move them there. The default drag operation is Move — the item is removed from the Shelf once the drop succeeds. Hold Ctrl while dragging to Copy instead (the item stays on the Shelf).

Pinned items are never removed from the Shelf after a drag-out, even on a Move operation.

Pin / Unpin

Hover over an item in the Shelf list. Two small buttons appear on the right — a pin and an X. Click the pin to lock the item. Pinned items display a small pin indicator in the top-right corner of their icon, and they have two important properties:

They survive Clear All (the trash icon in the Shelf header leaves them in place).
They survive Move here (the batch Move operation leaves pinned items on the Shelf but updates their stored paths to point to the new destination).
They persist across app restarts along with their pin state.

You can also right-click an item and choose Pin / Unpin from the context menu.

Unpinning works the same way — click the pin button again or use the context menu.

Right-click any Shelf item for:

Open — launches the file with its default application (via the shell).
Go to source — navigates the active tab to the folder the item came from.
Pin / Unpin — toggle lock state.
Remove — takes the item off the Shelf (does not delete the file).

Open an item

Double-click any item to open it with the system default application. Folders open in a new location in the active tab.

Remove

Hover an item and click the ✕ button, or select one or more items and press Delete. This only removes the item from the Shelf — it never deletes the actual file on disk.

Clear all (except pinned)

The trash icon in the Shelf header (top-right area) clears every unpinned item in a single click. Pinned items stay exactly where they are. If a Clear leaves the Shelf with at least one pinned item, a toast notification confirms that the pinned items were kept.

Close the panel

The X button next to the trash icon fully hides the Shelf (slides it off-screen). If items remain, the Shelf will still reappear as a 36-px badge the next time you move the cursor to the right edge — hiding is not the same as clearing.

Moving and copying to a destination

The footer of the Shelf panel has two buttons:

Move here — batch-moves every item currently on the Shelf to the active tab’s current folder. Unpinned items are removed from the Shelf; pinned items are kept (and their recorded source path is updated to point to the destination).
Copy here — batch-copies every item to the active tab’s current folder. Nothing is removed from the Shelf. Use this when you want the same batch to go to multiple destinations.

Both buttons use Span’s standard file operation engine, which means they inherit:

Progress reporting in the operation status bar
Conflict resolution (skip / replace / rename / apply-to-all)
Undo support (Ctrl+Z reverts the entire batch)
Continue-on-error behavior for read-only or in-use files

Tip: You can also drag items out of the Shelf directly onto any folder column in Miller view to move them just to that folder. This is handy when you want to split the Shelf pile across several destinations — dribble a few to one folder, a few to another.

Capacity and limits

Limit	Value	Why
Max items	50	Performance, visual clarity, and to nudge you to actually complete your batch
Max selection size per drop	Unlimited (until the 50-item cap)	Drop a whole Explorer window worth of selection in one go
Persistence	Yes (JSON, local settings)	Safe across app restarts
Sharing between windows	No (per-window)	Each SPAN window has its own Shelf (see FAQ)

When you try to add an item that would push the total past 50, the Shelf rejects the new item and shows a brief toast notification. Remove some items or complete your batch first.

Persistence — what survives an app restart?

On app exit, Span serializes the Shelf to a JSON blob in the application settings. On the next launch, it deserializes and reconstructs the Shelf.

What is saved:

The full path of each item.
The pin state (IsPinned) of each item.

What is not saved (it is recomputed fresh on load):

Icons (rebuilt from the current icon theme).
File size and timestamps (re-read from disk).
Selection state, scroll position, hover state.

On load, Span rebuilds each item by checking that the file or folder still exists. Items whose underlying path no longer exists are silently filtered out — you will not see ghost entries pointing at deleted files.

Span also understands an older storage format from pre-pin versions (a plain List<string> of paths). If it finds one, it auto-migrates every path to the new format with IsPinned = false. You do not need to do anything.

If you turn off Save Shelf on exit in Settings, Span writes an empty Shelf at shutdown, effectively clearing it for the next session.

Auto-hide behavior

The Shelf panel’s visibility is derived from three internal signals (from MainViewModel.IsShelfPanelVisible):

Visible  =  user manually toggled it on
         OR something is being dragged near the right edge
         OR the Shelf currently has at least one item
Hidden   =  none of the above

In practical terms:

Empty + idle → hidden off-screen. Shelf does not exist visually.
Dragging near the right edge → slides out to full panel (Yoink mode).
Has at least one item → stays as a 36-px badge on the right edge; expands to full on hover; collapses again 500 ms after the cursor leaves.
You pressed Ctrl+B → opens to full panel regardless of count, stays open until you press Ctrl+B again or click X.

Once you drop the first item, the Shelf stays visible (as a badge minimum) until you either clear it entirely or click the close button.

Settings

Open Settings → Sidebar (or search “shelf” in Settings) for:

File Shelf (ShelfEnabled, default on) — master switch. When off, the panel is hidden, drag-to-right-edge does nothing, and the Ctrl+B / Ctrl+Shift+B shortcuts no-op. Useful if you prefer to keep workflows strictly inside the columns.
Save Shelf on exit (ShelfSaveEnabled, default on) — persist the Shelf contents across app restarts. Turn off if you want each session to start with a clean Shelf.

Toggling File Shelf off at runtime also stops any active collapse timers and pointer tracking immediately. Toggling it back on with items still saved restores them directly to the collapsed (36-px badge) state.

Keyboard shortcuts

Both shortcuts are defined in KeyBindingService and are fully remappable from Settings → Shortcuts.

Action	Default	Remappable
Toggle Shelf panel (open/close)	`Ctrl+B`	Yes
Add current selection to Shelf	`Ctrl+Shift+B`	Yes
Remove selected Shelf items	`Delete` (when Shelf list has focus)	Built-in

There are currently no default shortcuts for “Move here”, “Copy here”, or “Clear all” — those are click-only actions. If you use them frequently, remap them in Settings → Shortcuts (the Shelf command palette entries surface the same operations).

Full shortcuts list

FAQ

Will Shelf items be moved if I drag them out to a folder?

Yes — drag is a move by default, and the item is removed from the Shelf when the drop completes. Hold Ctrl while dragging to copy instead (item stays on the Shelf). Pinned items are always kept on the Shelf even on a move.

What happens to Shelf items if I delete the original file outside of Span?

The file disappears from disk, but the entry stays on the Shelf until the next time Span reloads it (at app restart). On load, Span checks every stored path against the filesystem and drops entries whose underlying file or folder no longer exists. You will not see permanent ghost entries.

If you want the ghosts gone immediately, restart the app or manually remove them with the ✕ button.

Can I have multiple separate Shelves?

Not currently. There is one Shelf per SPAN window, and it is shared across every tab within that window. Named or multiple-workspace Shelves are on the backlog.

Does the Shelf sync across multiple SPAN windows?

No. Each SPAN window owns its own Shelf in memory. Only one window’s Shelf is persisted across restarts (whichever saves last wins). Treat the Shelf as per-window for now — collect and drop inside the same window to avoid surprises.

Why can’t I see the Shelf at all?

One of four things:

It is empty and auto-hidden. Drag any file to the right edge of the window (or press Ctrl+B) to summon it.
It is collapsed to the 36-px badge on the right edge. Hover over the right edge and it will expand.
It is disabled in Settings. Open Settings → Sidebar → File Shelf and turn it on.
The window is very narrow and the badge is hidden behind other UI. Resize the window wider.

Does Move here respect conflict resolution?

Yes. Move here and Copy here both use Span’s standard file operation engine, so you get the normal conflict dialog (skip / replace / rename, with “apply to all”) and full undo support via Ctrl+Z.

Are pinned items persistent across restarts?

Yes. Pin state is serialized alongside the path and restored on the next launch.

Can I clear the Shelf without losing pinned items?

Yes — that is exactly what Clear all (the trash icon in the Shelf header) does. Pinned items stay, unpinned items are removed, and a toast notification confirms pinned items were kept.

What’s the max number of items?

Attempting to add more shows a “Shelf is full” toast and rejects the new items until you make room.