# Navigating the filesystem sidebar is slow when there are many files

**URL:** <https://community.bear.app/t/navigating-the-filesystem-sidebar-is-slow-when-there-are-many-files/20025>\
**Category:** Lettera feedback\
**Created:** [October 29, 2026, 5:44am UTC](https://community.bear.app/t/navigating-the-filesystem-sidebar-is-slow-when-there-are-many-files/20025 "2026-10-29T05:44:17Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![column-role](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6bbea6/32.png) [@column-role](https://community.bear.app/u/column-role)\
**Post date:** [October 29, 2026, 5:44am UTC](https://community.bear.app/t/navigating-the-filesystem-sidebar-is-slow-when-there-are-many-files/20025/1 "2026-10-29T05:44:17Z")

</div>

Lettera: Version 1.0.0 (4178)  
macOS: Version Tahoe 26.5.2 (25F84)  
Expected: using arrow keys to navigate up and down the filesystem list in the sidebar should be snappy (\<0.3s)  
Current: using arrow keys to navigate up and down the filesystem list in the sidebar is slow

In the following example:

1. ~70 files/folders visible in the sidebar (based on whatever has been expanded/collapsed)
2. 14609 files from `fd . | wc -l` – most of them not shown in the sidebar

Note: This is not a CPU or memory constraint. I get it at ~10% CPU usage and ~50% memory usage, on an M5 Pro chip.

Also: Spinning ball of doom with large log files.  
Lettera Version 1.0.0 (4266)

Might also be a bug, it’s not intuitive that markdown files include .log files.

Maybe we should set some limits on file size?

Again this is not an issue with CPU or memory. The same file is fine in `Zed`, and this was run on an M5 Pro chip with 48GB RAM.

 ![CleanShot 2026-08-13 at 22.51.43@2x](https://europe1.discourse-cdn.com/flex013/uploads/bear/original/2X/8/8a3b36fee8e715c6a7353f6cd5f06c5bf7022091.png)