¶Using Conductor

Conductor is a single-window cockpit for your local projects. This page describes the main UI areas and the everyday workflow.

¶The window at a glance

┌────────────┬───────────────────────────────────────────┬───────────┐
│ Sidebar    │  Tabs  ───────────────────────  Top actions │  Files    │
│ (projects) ├───────────────────────────────────────────┤  (tree)   │
│            │                                             │           │
│ Pinned     │           Split panes (terminals,           │           │
│ Projects   │            agent panels, editor)            │           │
│            │                                             │           │
└────────────┴───────────────────────────────────────────┴───────────┘

• Left sidebar — the project switcher with fuzzy search, git status per repo, and pinned favourites. See Projects & sidebar.
• Tabs — one tab per open terminal session or Elyra agent. Drag to reorder; a tab pulses green when a background terminal produces output.
• Top actions — search (⌘K), quick edit, show/hide editor, toggle files, broadcast input (⌁ Sync), theme toggle, keyboard help, and (for git repos) commit.
• Panes — the active tab's split layout. Each pane is a real terminal, an agent panel, or the Monaco editor.
• Right sidebar (Files) — a lazy-loaded file tree of the active project. Toggle with ⌘B. See Files & editor.

¶Typical workflow

1. Pick a project from the sidebar (or ⌘K → its name). A terminal tab opens in that folder. Selecting a project that is already open just focuses its tab.
2. Split panes to run several processes side by side — a dev server, a test watcher, a shell. The PTY and scrollback survive splits and divider drags.
3. Run a task with ⌘K → Run: … (scripts discovered from the project — see Tasks).
4. Browse and edit files in the right sidebar, or open the project in your real editor with the per-project zed / code / cursor buttons.
5. Commit with the in-app dialog when a repo is dirty. See Git.
6. Save the layout as a workspace if you want to come back to exactly this setup — see Workspaces.

¶Sessions persist automatically

Conductor remembers your tabs, split layout, active project, theme, and open file across restarts (via localStorage). Terminals come back with the same structure and working directory, and recent scrollback is replayed as read-only history. See State & persistence for exactly what is stored.

¶Keyboard-first

Almost everything is reachable from the keyboard. Start with ⌘K (command palette) and ⌘/ (shortcut help). The full list is in Keyboard shortcuts.