Navigate the app and its panels

Lesson 1 of 412 min

What you'll learn

You can point to every region of the window (titlebar, left sidebar, editor area, terminal dock) and say what lives there.
You can flip the left sidebar between Agent and Workspace from the nav row at its top, and reach Source Control from the workspace list.
You can open any view (knowledge graph, entity table, cases, terminal) with a shortcut or the "Search everything" palette.
You can read the file tree's colored lifecycle dots at a glance.
You can hide the terminal dock without killing the shells inside it.

When you first open a workspace, you see the titlebar controls and the file tree on the left. your-folder · No open tabs means the folder is connected and no document is open yet.

The app has a titlebar, left sidebar, editor area, terminal dock, and search palette. Learn what each area does and how to move between the workspace, graph, and agent.

The five regions of the Consilience window: titlebar, left sidebar, editor area, terminal dock, and the palette that floats above them all.

The titlebar: navigation, tabs, tools

The titlebar is more than window buttons. Left to right: the workspace selector, the button that hides and shows the sidebar, the workspace tab strip in the center, and a cluster of tools on the right.

Zone	What you see	What it does
Far left	Workspace selector	The current workspace's name with a chevron — this is how you switch workspaces. The menu holds your account line, "Settings", "Share", your recent local workspaces (pinned ones first), your cloud workspaces when you're signed in, and finally "Open local workspace…", "Import shared workspace", "Cloud workspaces…". Right-click a recent row for "Pin to top" / "Unpin", "Open in new window", "Copy to cloud…", "Open in Finder", "Remove from list"
Left	Sidebar show/hide button	Collapses the whole left sidebar, or brings it back. The sidebar's own nav — Agent, Workspace, Knowledge graph, Activity — lives at the top of the sidebar itself, not up here
Center	Workspace tab strip	One tab per open surface: notes, chats, the graph, entity pages, cases, maps, ingest, settings, diffs, each with its own icon
Right	Tool cluster	The Live collection control (an RSS mark, with a count when minute-scale feeds are waiting), the "Terminal" toggle, and — while a document is open — its save badge, undo/redo, and a "More actions" (…) menu
Center, while finding	Find bar (⌘F)	Takes over the tab strip to search the active document, or to filter nodes when the graph is open

Three tab-strip tricks

Middle-click any tab to close it. No hunting for the × button.

Press a tab and drag: the whole OS window moves with it, because the strip doubles as the titlebar.

A dot on a tab means "Unsaved changes". A spinner on a chat tab means "Running", so an AI turn is still going.

The left sidebar is one panel with several faces, switched from the small nav row pinned to its top: Agent, Workspace, Knowledge graph, Activity, and a search button at the right end. A bar along the bottom holds "New chat" and "New document". ⌘⇧E jumps straight to Workspace 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.
Workspace is the file tree: your workspace folder, live. This is where the lesson spends most of its time.
Knowledge graph isn't a sidebar of its own. It opens the graph as a tab, and while that tab is in front the sidebar shows the graph's own controls.
Activity is the inbox. It replaces the sidebar's content while it's open, and the bell carries a badge when something is unread.
Source Control is the git panel. It isn't in the nav row: you enter it from the "Source Control" row in Workspace mode and leave by its back arrow. 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.

A short action list sits above the tree: "New document", "Extract sources", "Live feeds", "Cases", "Add via research", and "Source Control". 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".

Reading the dots

That dot is the file's knowledge-graph lifecycle badge: has the AI read this file yet?

A red dot means "Not added to AI search yet". Hover it and a card offers "Add to AI".

An orange dot means "Changed, and the AI hasn't caught up". The card offers "Update".

No dot at all is good news: the AI is current. The graph lifecycle lesson walks through every state in detail.

Switch tabs in the editor area

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

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.

Shortcut	Action
⌘⇧F	"Search everything": the global palette
⌘F	"Find": search inside the active document, or filter graph nodes
⌘\	"Toggle sidebar"
⌘⇧E	"Browse files": sidebar to the Workspace file tree
⌘`	"Toggle terminal"
⌘⇧C	"New chat"
⌘⇧D	"New document"
⌘⇧I	"Extract sources"
⌘⇧R	"Add via research"
⌘⇧G	"Toggle knowledge graph"
⌘⇧L	"Entity table"
⌘⇧K	"Cases"

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 Sidebar, Toggle Terminal, Knowledge Graph, and app-wide interface zoom (Zoom In ⌘=, Zoom Out ⌘−, Reset Zoom ⌘0).
Go: Ingest Wizard, Source Control, Connections, Live Feeds, for jumping across surfaces.
Agent: New Chat, Cancel Run, and the conversation's Permission Mode (Ask / Auto-edit / Plan / Full Access).
Help: Consilience Academy, Get Started Checklist, Consilience Docs, Report Feedback…, 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 titlebar workspace selector 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 faces, picked from the nav row at its top: Agent, Workspace, and the Activity inbox — with Source Control entered from the workspace list.
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.

Walk the window in 90 seconds

Press ⌘⇧E. The sidebar switches to "Workspace". Hover any file row and watch its dot turn into an edited time like "2h".
Press ⌘⇧G. A "Knowledge graph" tab opens in the titlebar strip. Views are tabs.
Press ⌘ and type ls. Your notes list in a real shell. Press ⌘ again to hide it.
Press ⌘⇧F, type "entity", and hit Enter on "Entity table".
Press ⌘\ twice: the whole sidebar vanishes and returns.

You've touched every region of the window, and the shell you hid in step 3 is still running in the dock.

Two launchers, two jobs

⌘F searches *inside* the open document (and filters nodes when the graph is up); ⌘⇧F opens "Search everything" across the whole workspace. Reach for ⌘F when you want the page, ⌘⇧F when you want the workspace.

If you memorize only one, make it ⌘⇧F. It finds notes, concepts, app actions, and Settings at once, doubles as the command palette, and always shows the live shortcut for whatever it can do.

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

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