Luxa File Manager — User Guide

Go to File Manager in the WordPress admin menu. By default, access is limited to users with the upload_files capability — Administrators and Editors, on a standard WordPress install. If you don’t see the menu item, you don’t currently have permission to use it.

If Pro is active, a PRO badge appears next to the menu label, and a second submenu item, Pro Settings, appears underneath it.

• Sidebar (left) — quick links to Root, wp-content, wp-includes, and wp-admin. Bookmarks (Pro) appear here too, once you’ve starred something.
• Toolbar (top) — the current folder path (breadcrumb), and action buttons: New Folder, New File, Upload, and, with Pro active, Zip, Move, Copy, and Delete for anything you’ve selected with the checkboxes.
• Filter bar — a quick text filter that narrows down what’s shown in the current folder only. For a search across your entire server, use Global Search (Pro).
• File table / grid — the actual contents of the current folder.
• Status bar (bottom) — shows what’s happening, plus a running item count.

Click any folder name to open it. Use the breadcrumb at the top of the toolbar to jump back to a parent folder, or click one of the sidebar shortcuts to jump straight to a common location.

Click any column header (Name, Size, Last Modified) to sort by that column; click again to reverse the sort direction.

List and Grid layout

Two small icons at the right of the toolbar switch between:

• List — the default view, showing name, size, date, permissions, and per-row actions.
• Grid — a compact icon grid showing just the icon and name for each item, useful when you mainly care about recognizing files visually. Actions in Grid view are available through the right-click context menu.

Your choice is remembered in this browser for next time.

Light / Dark theme

A split Light/Dark switch sits at the bottom of the sidebar. Click either half to switch; your choice is remembered in this browser for next time. If you’re using Pro’s syntax-highlighted code editor, it follows the same theme automatically.

Use New Folder or New File in the toolbar, type a name, and confirm. A new file opens empty — use the code editor (below) to add content and save it.

Click Upload and choose one or more files. A progress bar tracks the transfer.

If a file with the same name already exists in the current folder, you’ll be asked before anything happens:

• Replace — overwrites the existing file(s) with the new upload.
• Skip existing — uploads only the files that don’t already exist, leaving the existing ones untouched.

Click the download icon on a file’s row (List view) or right-click it and choose Download (Grid view or List view alike). Folders can’t be downloaded directly — zip them first (Pro), then download the resulting archive.

Click the rename icon on a row, or right-click and choose Rename, then enter the new name.

Click the delete icon on a row, or right-click and choose Delete. You’ll be asked to confirm.

• With Pro licensed: deleted items are moved to Trash by default and can be restored later. If you’re certain you want to skip that safety net, tick “Skip Trash and delete immediately. This action cannot be undone.” in the confirmation dialog.
• Without Pro (or unlicensed): deletion is always immediate and permanent — there’s no Trash to move items into.

Deleting multiple items at once (Pro)

Tick the checkboxes next to the items you want to remove (the checkbox column only appears when Pro is active), then click Delete in the toolbar. The same Trash/Skip Trash choice applies to the whole selection.

Trash (Pro)

Go to File Manager → Trash to see everything currently in the Trash: original name and location, size, who deleted it, and when. From there you can:

• Restore — moves the item back to its original location. If something already occupies that location, or the original folder no longer exists, you’ll get a clear error instead of a silent overwrite.
• Delete permanently — removes a single item for good.
• Empty Trash — permanently deletes everything in the Trash at once.

Items left in Trash are automatically deleted permanently after a period of time (30 days by default) to keep it from growing forever.

Click a file’s name (for editable text-based types — PHP, JS, CSS, HTML, JSON, TXT, and similar) or use the Edit action, and the built-in editor opens.

• Save: click Save, or press Ctrl+S (Cmd+S on macOS).
• Find in file: click the magnifying-glass icon in the editor header, or press Ctrl+F (Cmd+F). Type your search term and matches are found and highlighted as you type — no need to press Enter. Press Enter to jump to the next match, Shift+Enter for the previous one, and Escape or the close button to dismiss the search bar.
• Close without saving using the Close button; unsaved changes are discarded.

Files larger than 2 MB can’t be opened in the editor — download them instead if you need to inspect them.

(Pro) With an active license, the editor gets full syntax highlighting for PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JSON, XML, SQL, and YAML, matching whichever Light/Dark theme you have selected.

Use the per-row Copy/Move action to duplicate or relocate a single item, or select multiple items with the checkboxes and use the Move / Copy buttons in the toolbar to act on all of them at once. You’ll be asked for a destination folder.

Select one or more items and click Zip to compress them into a single .zip archive in the current folder. To extract an existing .zip file, use its Unzip action and choose a destination (defaults to the same folder).

Click Search in the toolbar to search by filename across your entire server, not just the folder you’re currently viewing. Results show the match’s full path — click one to jump straight to it.

Click the star icon on any file or folder to bookmark it. Bookmarked items appear in the sidebar for one-click access, no matter how deep they are in your folder structure. Click the star again (or the remove button next to a bookmark in the sidebar) to remove it.

Click the preview icon on an image file (JPG, PNG, GIF, WebP, SVG) to view it without downloading it first.

Under Pro Settings, you can:

• Choose which WordPress roles (beyond Administrator, which always has access) are allowed to open File Manager at all.
• Restrict browsing to specific folders — for example, limiting access to only /wp-content/uploads for a particular role.

These settings apply immediately, without needing any other plugin.

Right-clicking any file or folder opens a context menu with the actions relevant to it (Edit, Download, Rename, Delete, plus Copy/Move, Zip, Bookmark, and Preview when Pro is active) — a faster alternative to using the per-row buttons.