Edit objects

Text objects can be edited in place or handed to an editor already installed on this machine. Both paths check whether the stored object changed before writing your version back.

Edit headers, metadata and tags

Choose Headers and tags from an object’s context menu, or Edit in the detail panel’s Headers section. The editor covers Content-Type, Cache-Control, Content-Disposition, Content-Encoding, Content-Language, x-amz-meta-* user metadata and object tags.

Headers and user metadata are changed by copying the object onto itself at the provider. Its bytes do not pass through this computer, but the rewrite changes the modified time and adds a version when versioning is enabled. The app keeps the storage class, encryption and public-read access, and refuses objects it cannot rewrite faithfully: objects over 5 GB, archived objects, objects using a customer-provided encryption key and objects with other access grants.

Changing only tags does not rewrite the object. Providers without object tagging do not offer that part of the editor. Both kinds of change appear in the activity trail.

Edit in the app

Open an object and choose Edit, or choose Edit from the object’s context menu. The built-in editor opens the complete object rather than the prefix a viewer may use.

It accepts UTF-8 text up to 1 MB, including text/*, JSON, XML, JavaScript and HLS playlists. It refuses an object when:

• the connection is read-only;
• the contents are not a supported text type or valid UTF-8;
• the object is larger than 1 MB;
• Content-Encoding means the stored bytes are not the text you would edit; or
• the object is in an archival storage class and has not been restored.

Saving preserves UTF-8 byte-order marks and the original LF or CRLF line ending. If the object mixes both line endings, the editor warns that saving will make them consistent.

Open in another editor

Choose Open in editor when you need a full editor or when an object is too large for the built-in one. You can use the system default or choose from the editors the app finds. External editing is limited to objects up to 64 MB and to eight open sessions at once.

This path downloads the complete object to a private temporary directory. The app watches that file and writes back meaningful changes; an editor rewriting an unchanged file does not create another object version. The session panel shows each successful write and whether the local file is currently in sync.

Stop the session from the app when you are done. Its temporary directory — including any swap or backup files created beside the object — is removed when the session ends or the app exits.

If the object changes elsewhere

Before each save, the app checks the version that was opened. If another person or process changed or deleted the object, the write pauses instead of silently replacing their work.

The choices are:

• Save a copy writes your text beside the original as name (conflicted copy).ext. Editing then continues on that copy.
• Reload theirs discards your edits and opens the version now stored. It is unavailable if the object was deleted.
• Overwrite theirs replaces the newer version with yours. If the object was deleted, this recreates it.

Save a copy is the only option that preserves both versions. Overwritten content is recoverable only when the bucket has versioning enabled.

Some compatible providers do not honor conditional writes. The app probes that behavior before editing and labels the session when conflict protection is only best effort.

Next

Move data between folders, buckets and providers.