Desktop: setting to allow file previews outside the project folder (suppress per-file prompt)

Status Open
Maintainer reply None cached
Activity 0 comments · opened Jul 24, 2026

Feature request

The desktop app prompts on every preview of a file outside the session's project folder:

Allow Claude to open /path/to/file? This file is outside your project folder. Anything shown in the preview is readable by Claude in this session.

with only Deny / Allow once options. There appears to be no way to allow this durably: permissions.additionalDirectories and Read(//**) allow rules do not suppress it (reads themselves don't prompt — only the preview does), and I couldn't find a relevant key in the settings schema or docs (checked code.claude.com/docs/en/desktop and /permissions).

Use case

Solo developer, deliberate convenience-first setup, sessions opened per subdirectory of a monorepo. Sessions routinely write HTML reports to a sibling directory (a shared ledger outside the session folder) and preview them. Every single preview costs a click, and "Allow once" never persists.

Ask

Any of these would solve it, in order of preference:

  1. Honor permissions.additionalDirectories (or the existing Read allow rules) for the preview gate.
  2. A settings key to trust a directory tree (or everything) for previews, e.g. preview.allowedDirectories: ["/"].
  3. At minimum an "Always allow for this folder" button on the prompt.

Claude Code v2.1.218, macOS.

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