Running a project from the Projects view opens the Explorer in an editor tab — dock it in a split like any editor. One tab per project: running or opening again re-focuses the existing tab instead of duplicating it.
Refreshing
Reload the preview without leaving the tab:
- Click the refresh icon in the tab's title bar, or
- Press
Cmd+R(macOS) /Ctrl+Rwhile the docs tab is active — outside the docs tab the keys keep their normal VS Code meaning.
Refreshing reloads the Explorer from its dev server and returns to the docs home page.
Restarting the server
Click the restart icon next to refresh to stop the project's dev server and
start it again, then reload the tab once it's back. Reach for it when the server
needs a clean boot — after editing sdocs.config.*, installing dependencies, or
if the dev server wedges. Refreshing only reloads the page; restarting relaunches
the underlying sdocs process.
Opening in a browser
Click the globe icon in the tab's title bar to hand the page you are reading to your own browser — the same route, not the docs home.
Reach for it when the tab's own limits get in the way. A docs tab is a
webview, and a webview is a sandboxed frame: window.open, alert() and confirm() do nothing inside one, however the page asks. An example that
opens a window or raises an alert needs a real browser to show what it does.
Copying does work in the tab. The editor answers Cmd+C and friends by
looking for a selection in a document the Explorer isn't in, so the
Explorer answers those shortcuts itself — copy, cut, paste, select-all and
undo behave as they do anywhere else.
Tips
- The tab embeds the same dev server you can open in the browser — the globe icon lands on the page you are reading, Browser ↗ on the project card at the docs home.
- To inspect the tab itself, run Developer: Open Webview Developer Tools from the command palette while the tab is focused.