---
title: Auto Context — selection mode + bulk actions
---

# Auto Context — selection mode + bulk actions

## What it is

A multi-select mode on the **Auto Context** sidebar panel (the collapsible group that lists every file the project automatically feeds the agent — see [project-docs-auto-injection.md](project-docs-auto-injection.md) for the underlying feature). Lets you pick several Always-inject or On-demand-context docs at once and then **copy their contents to the clipboard** (with `--- filename ---` headers between each one) or **delete them in one confirmation**, instead of repeating the single-row right-click menu N times.

It also adds a **Copy contents** entry to the single-row right-click menu for the same one-doc-to-clipboard flow when you don't need a bulk operation.

Desktop only — the toggle and the bulk-action footer are hidden on mobile (`hidden md:flex`). Mobile users still get single-doc actions via the existing long-press / row menu.

**System Instructions are deliberately not selectable.** The third Auto Context sub-group (CLAUDE.md / MEMORY.md and their synced mirrors) is view / edit-only — bulk-delete would let one stray Ctrl+A wipe the agent's persistent rules + memory in a single confirm, so those rows render without a checkbox slot and never appear in the selection count. Bulk copy / delete only touches the Always-inject and On-demand context sub-groups.

## Where to find it

Everything here lives in the **Auto Context** group of the left sidebar. Expand that group on any real project — virtual projects with no on-disk folder don't have docs.

The **Select** square icon sits at the **right end of the filter search row**, next to the search input. Once at least one row is ticked, a bulk-action footer slides in under the doc list. Both the toggle and the footer are desktop-only; on a phone the same actions are available one doc at a time through the long-press / row menu.

## How it behaves

### How to use it

1. Expand the **Auto Context** sidebar group on any real project (virtual projects with no on-disk folder don't have docs).
2. Click the **Select** square icon at the **right end of the filter search row** (sits next to the search input). The square fills in (`text-accent` colour) and Always-inject + On-demand-context rows gain a checkbox slot at the left edge of each row. System Instructions rows stay unchanged.
3. **Click** a row to toggle its selection. **Shift+click** a second row to range-select every row between the previous click and that one. **Ctrl/Cmd+click** behaves the same as a plain click in selection mode (toggle one row), and also works **outside** selection mode to enter it and pick the first row in one stroke.
4. The bulk-action footer slides in under the doc list once at least one row is selected, showing `N selected` plus three buttons:
   - **Copy** — concatenates each selected doc's full text contents into one clipboard payload, separated by `--- <filename> ---` headers, and fires a toast. Binary files (images, PDFs) emit a `[Binary file <filename> — <size> bytes — not copied]` placeholder line in their slot so you still see them in the output.
   - **Delete** — opens a confirm dialog (`Delete N docs?`) listing the selected filenames; **Confirm** loops through `FILES_DELETE` per file, fires a single summary toast at the end, then drops out of selection mode.
   - **× Cancel** — exits selection mode and clears the selection without touching anything.
5. **Right-click** a selected row while in selection mode (with 2+ rows selected) → the row menu adapts to show **Copy N docs** and **Delete N docs** instead of the per-doc Rename / Delete / Copy contents entries. Right-clicking an _unselected_ row still shows the single-doc menu.
6. **Esc** exits selection mode, **Ctrl+A** selects every selectable doc currently visible under the search filter (System Instructions are skipped), **Ctrl+C** triggers the bulk-copy, and **Delete** / **Backspace** opens the bulk-delete dialog — but only while keyboard focus is inside the Auto Context panel itself, so the same shortcuts don't fight your text editing elsewhere on screen.

The **Select** button only renders when the panel is expanded AND at least one selectable doc exists (Always-inject or On-demand context) — there's nothing to select when the panel only holds System Instructions, or when the panel is empty.

**Filter narrows selection scope.** Selection commands respect the search query — `Ctrl+A` selects everything the current filter shows that is selectable. If you change the search while a selection is live, the selection persists; rows scrolled out of view by the filter stay in `selectedNames` until you exit selection mode.

### What participates

Both auto-injected buckets — the Always-inject docs at the top of `.claude/docs/` and the On-demand context docs in `.claude/docs/rag/` — participate equally; System Instructions never participate (see above):

- **Plain hand-dropped docs** (markdown, text, code, PDFs, images) — selectable in both Always-inject and On-demand context.
- **ContextDock-managed docs** (📦 bundles and 📋 lists, identified by the `ContextDockDocRow` sentinel) — selectable in both. Bulk copy reads their on-disk snapshot (the same content the agent sees), bulk delete unlinks the underlying file like the single-row Delete already does.

The single-doc right-click menus on plain docs (Copy contents / Rename / Delete) and on ContextDock rows (Open in browser / Copy contents / level options) gain the same **Copy contents** entry routed through the same `runCopyForNames([name])` helper, so the output format and clipboard path is identical whether you copy one doc or twenty.

### What's deliberately suppressed in selection mode

Selection-mode clicks need a clean way to toggle rows, so two row gestures pause while it's on:

- **Drag-reorder is disabled** on every selectable row — the row's long-press drag-props are not forwarded (so a press-and-hold toggles selection instead of starting a drag), and a checkbox slot appears at the left edge. Re-ordering is available again when you exit selection mode.
- **Middle-click delete is suppressed** on ContextDock rows — the row's existing middle-click "delete this row" handler returns early when `selectionMode` is true, so a middle-click drag-scroll gesture across the list can't accidentally remove every row it passes over.

Single-doc click-to-open-the-file-peek is also suppressed in selection mode — a plain click toggles the selection instead. Exit selection mode (Esc, the **×** in the footer, or click the header Select button again) to get the original behaviour back.

### Clipboard size cap

Bulk copy is bounded by a **5 MB byte cap** on the concatenated payload (`BULK_COPY_BYTE_CAP` in [src/renderer/src/features/dashboard/ProjectDocsSection.tsx](../../src/renderer/src/features/dashboard/ProjectDocsSection.tsx)). If the running total would exceed the cap, the helper stops concatenating and fires an error toast naming the file that pushed it over — your clipboard is left untouched, no partial dump. The cap protects against accidentally pulling a folder full of multi-megabyte image data-URIs into clipboard memory (the underlying `FILES_READ_ABSOLUTE` IPC returns `data:` strings for image files, which inflate by ~33% from base64).

### Why a separate page

The auto-injection page describes _how files reach the agent_ — the first-message inline injection, the first-message binary attachment, the bucket split, the cap, and the three-sub-group sidebar surface. Selection mode is orthogonal: it's _how you wrangle the files inside the sidebar_ once they're already there. They share the same data source (the same `FILES_LIST_PROJECT_DOCS` IPC response, the same on-disk folder layout, the same ContextDock sentinel detection, the same System Instructions probe) but the user flow, the surface, and the failure modes are different — so the two pages stay independent and cross-link.

## Related

Selection mode only makes sense on top of the Auto Context panel itself, so [project-docs-auto-injection.md](project-docs-auto-injection.md) is the page to read first: it explains the first-message inline injection, the binary attachment, the bucket split and the three-sub-group sidebar layout that this mode operates on. ContextDock-managed bundles and lists participate in selection, bulk copy and bulk delete exactly like hand-dropped docs do, so [contextdock.md](contextdock.md) is the natural companion. The third sub-group — System Instructions, meaning CLAUDE.md / MEMORY.md and their synced mirrors — is view / edit-only and never participates in bulk delete, which [agent-instructions-sync.md](agent-instructions-sync.md) covers. If you like the mental model here, the same idea exists on a different surface in [bulk-select-sidebar.md](bulk-select-sidebar.md), the bulk-select feature on the sessions sidebar.