Using the Workbench

The workbench is the chat’s side panel — a thin, always-visible strip of icons, plus a content panel that opens on demand. It’s where you work with files, git, the terminal, and the rest of the project context without leaving the conversation.

Opening and closing

Shortcut: Ctrl+\ (Windows/Linux) or ⌘+\ (Mac).
Click an icon in the side strip to open that tab; clicking the already-active tab collapses the panel.
The X button in the panel header closes the current tab.

The 10 tabs

Terminal

A real shell via PTY (pywinpty/ptyprocess), rendered with xterm.js. Multiple instances per session ("+" tab to open a new one), each nameable. A terminal opens automatically on mount if the workspace is trusted — untrusted workspaces don’t get a terminal.

Files

The workspace’s file tree. Toolbar with new file/folder, refresh, and inline search. Each item has hover actions: @ (adds to chat context), open as floating window, inline rename, move to trash (Del) or permanent delete (Shift+Del). Pinned files get their own section at the top. A history button shows a file’s versions via git log/git show.

Diff (Git)

Two sub-tabs: Changes (modified/staged/untracked files, with an expandable patch and per-file stage/unstage) and History (commit log, click to show the full diff). Dedicated modals for Stash, Worktrees, and PR creation. Branch selector and a sync button in the toolbar. Beyond the basics, both the UI and the agent’s git tools support amend, squash, interactive reorder, and cherry-pick, alongside fetch/merge/revert/compare/conflict-resolution — the same operation set is available whether you drive it by hand or ask the agent to.

Plan

Lists artifacts generated by the agent in the session (plans, specs, markdown guides, via the create_artifact tool) and a “Files touched” section with everything the agent has read/created/edited in this thread.

Browser

Both a dev-server preview and a free-navigation browser in one panel. An always-editable URL bar with back/forward history lets you (or the agent, via browser_navigate) load any external site, not just a local dev server. Your project’s configured dev servers (from launch.json) still show up as one-click shortcuts, with play/stop/refresh and a log console — they’re a convenience layer on top of the same panel, not a separate feature.

Memory

A live timeline of RAG and web searches in progress, with retrieved excerpts (expandable pills, separated into “knowledge base” vs. “web results”). A RAG settings panel lets you adjust reranker, top_k, and embedding provider.

This tab also holds the “What I’ve learned about you” panel — a read-only view of the durable facts and skills Remember has saved on your behalf, so you don’t have to remember which thread first taught the agent something. Buckets you pull in from other users live here too, under Memory Library.

A search box at the top of the tab queries facts, skills, and RAG buckets at once — type-filter chips narrow results to just one of the three when you know what you’re after.

Tasks

Background routines for the session: scheduled tasks (cron) or webhook-triggered (GitHub/GitLab/Slack). Each task has an enabled toggle, a “run now” button, and a log of past executions with a link to open the resulting thread.

Search

Search across all workspace files. The r: prefix enables regex mode (e.g., r:function\s+\w+). Results grouped by file, with a line preview — click opens the file at the exact position.

Context Graph

The workspace’s dependency and knowledge graph — see Context Graph for how it’s built. Here you trigger the build, track progress by stage (AST → semantic → done), and browse god nodes plus suggested questions.

Library

Three sections in one accordion: MCP (browse and install connectors from the curated + community registry), Skills (a catalog of installable skills), and Memory (shared memory buckets you can pull into your own RAG). Everything installable here can also be installed by the agent directly — install_mcp_from_registry, install_skill_from_catalog, install_memory_bucket — always pausing for your approval first, since installing changes your environment persistently. This tab is currently gated behind a beta flag while it stabilizes.

Session context menu

Right-clicking a session in the sidebar opens a context menu with Rename, Pin, and Delete — pinning keeps a session at the top of its group regardless of last activity. Renaming is inline (click, edit, Enter to confirm); deleting reuses the same confirmation dialog as the hover delete icon.

Floating windows

Clicking the “open as window” icon on a file (Files tab) opens an independent floating window — draggable, resizable (via react-rnd), with its own tabs if you open more than one file in it. Minimizing sends the window to the dock (bottom bar); clicking the dock restores it. Each window runs the Monaco editor (text) or a media viewer (images/video).