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Hike

Viewing & Navigation

Help and discovery

Section titled “Help and discovery”

The fastest way to learn Hike from inside the app is to use the built-in help screen and command palette.

The main Hike help screen.
Press F1 while focus is in the command line to see context-aware help.
Help for the Markdown viewer inside Hike.
Help changes with focus, so the Markdown pane exposes its own movement and document commands.
The Hike command palette.
The command palette is another good way to discover actions and their keybindings.

Responsive navigation

Section titled “Responsive navigation”

On narrower terminals Hike can switch to a single-pane layout automatically. The practical movement model is:

  • Ctrl+N jumps to the active sidebar view
  • Ctrl+G returns to the Markdown content
  • F2 still toggles navigation visibility

When the terminal grows wide enough again, Hike restores the normal split view.

Local browser behavior

Section titled “Local browser behavior”

The local browser now supports two modes:

  • tree — the original hierarchical directory tree
  • flat list — a relative-path list optimized for quick scanning

Use Ctrl+Shift+L or m while the local browser has focus to toggle modes.

In flat-list mode:

  • selecting a directory changes the local browser root
  • empty directories without visible Markdown descendants are hidden
  • ../ appears when a parent directory is available
  • Backspace moves to the parent directory directly

Startup selection

Section titled “Startup selection”

When Hike starts from a directory, it can auto-open a preferred file and select it in the sidebar. The default order is:

  1. INDEX.md
  2. README.md
  3. the first visible Markdown file in local-browser order

You can override that order in the configuration file. See Configuration → File Browser & Startup.