The window: every surface, mapped

Open your first workspace and Consilience shows you almost nothing. A quiet heading reads your-folder · No open tabs, a strip of icons runs across the top, and a file tree sits on the left. If you're wondering whether your files loaded, they did. The app just won't guess which document you wanted to open.

This lesson is the floor plan. The window has five regions: the titlebar, the left sidebar, the editor area, the terminal dock, and one palette that floats above them all. The workspace, graph, and agent you just met each have an address here, so learn the map once and nothing later feels hidden.

The titlebar: navigation, tabs, tools

The titlebar is more than window buttons. Left to right: the "Home" button, the sidebar mode toggle, the workspace tab strip in the center, and a cluster of tools on the right.

One sidebar, four rooms

The left sidebar is one panel with four faces, switched from the titlebar toggle. ⌘⇧E jumps straight to Workspace mode from anywhere; ⌘\ hides or shows the whole sidebar.

• Agent holds your AI chat sessions. If you're new, the "Get started" checklist sits at the bottom of the session list too.
• Document is a sidebar about whatever document is open. You'll meet it properly in the editor lesson.
• Workspace is the file tree: your workspace folder, live. This is where the lesson spends most of its time.
• Source Control is the git panel. The version control lesson covers it in full.

The file tree shows your folder exactly as it sits on disk: folders first, natural sort, a type-specific icon on each file. Click any file and it opens. Notes go to the editor, images and PDFs to their viewers.

Three buttons sit above the tree: "New document", "Extract sources", and "Share workspace". At the right edge of each file row is a small colored dot. Hover the row and it turns into a relative edited time like "2h".

The center stage: every view is a tab

The editor area shows whatever tab is active, and "tab" covers a lot more than text files. The markdown editor, the 3D knowledge graph, the entity table, a case file, a map, a design canvas, the ingest wizard, even Settings. Each one opens as a tab in the titlebar strip. Switching views is just switching tabs.

Close every tab and the editor area shows the empty-workspace command menu: a heading like "your-folder · No open tabs", the line "Pick a task to get started.", and a list of commands with their live shortcut chips. While your knowledge graph is still empty, "Extract sources" gets promoted to the one primary button. That's the app telling you what to do first.

The terminal dock: your shell, downstairs

Press ⌘ (or click the "Terminal" button in the titlebar) and the bottom of the editor splits open into a dock. Inside runs your **real login shell**, prompt and aliases and colors and all, started in your workspace folder, so ls` lists your notes right away. Tabs ("Terminal 1", "Terminal 2") line up on the left, where "New Terminal" (+) adds another and a double-click renames one.

Two very different things can make the dock disappear, and the difference matters. The chevron ("Close panel") or ⌘` only hides the dock. Every shell keeps running, output history (scrollback) and all. The × on a tab ("Kill terminal") actually ends that shell.

There's also a bridge to the AI: in the chat composer, type @ and pick "Terminals" to attach a snapshot of a terminal's last ~200 lines. One boundary worth remembering: the agent's own commands run as approval cards in the chat, so they never show up in this dock.

One palette, a dozen shortcuts

⌘⇧F opens "Search everything", the app's one Spotlight-style palette. It searches notes, extracted concepts, open tabs, workspaces, app actions, and Settings pages all at once. Scope chips (All · Workspaces · Documents · Concepts · Actions · Settings) narrow the results.

It's also the command palette: type "terminal" or "share" and hit Enter. Every typed query ends with an "Ask your workspace" row (⌘↵) that turns your search into a new AI chat. Nothing gets sent until you press send.

On Windows and Linux, Ctrl replaces ⌘. You can rebind every shortcut above in Settings ▸ Shortcuts. The palette always shows the current binding, so it quietly teaches you the faster route. macOS also has a full native menu bar, and a few things live only there:

• View: Toggle Terminal, Knowledge Graph, and app-wide interface zoom (Zoom In ⌘=, Zoom Out ⌘−, Reset Zoom ⌘0).
• Go: Home (Welcome), Ingest Wizard, Source Control, for jumping across surfaces.
• Agent: New Chat, Cancel Run, and the conversation's Permission Mode (Ask / Auto-edit / Plan / Full Access).
• Help: Show Onboarding (re-enter the guided tour any time), Get Started Checklist, Consilience Docs, Keyboard Shortcuts.
• Dock icon: right-click it to jump straight into a recent workspace, even when the app isn't in front.

Workspace

A plain folder on disk. Consilience opens exactly one per window; the "Home" button is how you switch.

Tab strip

The titlebar row of open surfaces: notes, chats, graph, cases, settings, one tab each.

Sidebar modes

The left sidebar's four faces: Agent, Document, Workspace, Source Control.

Lifecycle badge

The colored dot on a file row telling you whether the AI has read that file into the knowledge graph.

Terminal dock

The bottom panel running your real shell; hiding it never kills the shell.

Search everything

The ⌘⇧F palette: global search and command launcher in one.

That's the map. In the next lesson you open the Agent sidebar you just located and ask your workspace its first question.