Windows & Workscapes
Open a workscape in its own window — each window has its own sessions, editor, browser, and sidebar chrome, and every bound workscape window is restored after you quit.
A workscape is a set of work — its sessions and its Argus managers. Scape can run several workscapes at once, each in its own window. After you choose from the picker, each workscape window is bound to exactly one workscape (picker windows are temporarily unbound), and every workscape lives in at most one window at a time. Each window's editor tabs, browser, and sidebar/panel chrome are per-window state, not part of the saved workscape.
Open a window per project, per client, or per task, and switch between them the way you switch between any other Mac apps' windows — ⌘` or Mission Control — instead of swapping the whole app in place.
Opening a new window
Press ⇧⌘N (File ▸ New Window) to open a new window. It appears immediately — Scape never blocks on the choice of what to put in it — and shows a picker:
- New workscape (default) — starts a fresh, empty workscape, auto-named Workscape, Workscape 2, and so on. Press Return to take this option.
- Open a workscape — pick any saved workscape that isn't already open in another window. Each row shows the workscape's name, when it was last used, and its session count.
Use ↑ / ↓ to move, Return to confirm, and Esc (or click outside) to close the window without choosing.
One workscape per window
A workscape can be open in only one window at a time. A workscape already open elsewhere never appears in the New Window picker, and if two windows race to claim the same one, the second is told:
“‹name›” is already open in another window.
This keeps a workscape's sessions, terminals, and editor from being driven by two windows at once.
Switching workscapes
The workscape selector in the right sidebar is window navigation, not an in-place swap. Selecting a workscape:
- Opens it in a new window if it isn't running yet.
- Focuses its existing window if it's already open — raising it (and un-minimizing it from the Dock if needed).
- Does nothing if it's the workscape you're already looking at.
A small glyph on each non-current row tells you which will happen: a plain window icon means already open — selecting focuses it, and a window-with-plus means selecting opens it in a new window. The workscape you're already looking at carries no glyph.
What's independent per window
The working surfaces below are independent per window — what you do in one never reaches into another:
| Per window | Notes |
|---|---|
| Sessions & terminals | Each window drives only its own workscape's sessions. |
| Selected session | Selecting a session in one window doesn't move the selection in another. |
| Code editor | Opening a file in one window won't hijack another window's editor. |
| Browser companion | Each window has its own embedded browser and tabs. |
| Sidebar & panel chrome | Left sidebar, session sidebar, Toolkit, and Helm folds; the Helm and editor/web dividers. |
| Usage filter | Clicking an account card filters only that window's usage view. |
Restoring windows after quit
Your open workscape windows are restored when you relaunch Scape — each reopens bound to its workscape, at its last recorded position, and reloads that workscape's own sessions.
This survives a force-quit or crash, not just a clean ⌘Q: Scape records the set of open bound workscape windows to a manifest on disk (~/.scape/window-manifest.json) and writes it immediately whenever a window's workscape binding changes, so a bound window that was open at the moment of a crash comes back. (A clean quit flushes each window's current geometry; a force-quit can lose the very last position nudge, but never a binding.)
Argus across windows
An Argus manager belongs to one workscape. Its card appears only in the window bound to that workscape, and the child agents and sessions it spawns are tagged to it. (The Argus fleet itself keeps running in the background regardless of which windows are open — ownership only decides where the card shows up.)
To hand an Argus to another window, right-click its card and choose Move to Window, then pick the destination window (listed by its workscape name). The Argus moves together with its children — the running child agents and their backing sessions follow it to the new workscape. The menu appears when another bound workscape window is available to move it to.
Version 1 notes
A couple of intentional limits in this first release: