DocsWorkspaces & panes
Workspaces & panes
A workspace is one project's room: a color-coded tab holding a grid of panes, where every pane is a real terminal running an agent or a shell.
Updated 2026-06-12
Creating a workspace
Press ⌘N, run New workspace from ⌘K, or click New Workspace in the sidebar. You choose three things: a layout, a project directory (every pane opens there), and which sessions fill the panes.
Layout presets
| Preset | Panes | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| Deep Focus | 1 | one agent, your full attention |
| Split Screen | 2 | agent + shell, or two agents |
| Crossfire | 4 | a small fleet on one feature |
| War Room | 6 | parallel work across a repo |
| Command Center | 9 | heavy parallel sessions |
| Mothership | 16 | as much as a screen can hold |
Or pick Custom and build your own grid. Once you’ve configured a session mix you like — say, three Codex panes and a terminal — save it as a preset and relaunch the whole arrangement in one click next time.
Splitting and arranging
- ⌘D splits the focused pane vertically, ⌘⇧D horizontally. The new pane runs the same kind of session as the one you split; ⌘⌥D asks which agent to launch instead.
- Drag a pane by its header— drop it on another pane’s center to swap them, or on an edge to slot in beside it.
- Drag the divider between panes to resize them.
- ⌘⇧↵ takes the focused pane fullscreen inside the workspace; press again to drop back into the grid.
- ⌘W closes the focused pane and its neighbors absorb the space. Closing the last pane closes the workspace.
Moving around
- ⌘← ⌘→ ⌘↑ ⌘↓ move focus to the neighboring pane in that direction.
- ⌘1–⌘9 jump to your workspaces in order; ⌘⇧[ and ⌘⇧] cycle through them.
- ⌘K reaches everything:
@filters panes,#filters workspaces. See Command palette.
The pane menu
Right-click any pane header (or use the ⋯ button) for the full set: split, duplicate, rename, fullscreen, copy the working directory, reveal it in Finder, clear scrollback, and close.
Inside a pane
- Every pane is a real terminal running one process — an agent CLI launched through your default shell, or the shell itself. When an agent exits, the pane drops to a live prompt instead of going dead.
- Full-screen agent UIs (Claude Code, Codex, and friends) render natively — smooth scrolling, correct colors, no flicker.
- Drag a file from Finder onto a focused pane and the path lands at the cursor, already shell-escaped.
What persists
Workspaces live for the app session. Terminal processes can’t outlive the app, so quitting Kadro ADE ends the sessions inside them. What does carry over between launches: your saved presets, theme, default shell, keybindings, and sign-in.
Related
- Agents & launchers — every agent ADE can launch into a pane.
- Command palette — run all of the above from the keyboard.