Layout & navigation

Brisal’s window has four regions. Learn them once and every other feature has a place to live.

• Header — the full-width bar at the top. Global controls: which workspace you’re in, and where the app’s settings live.
• Sidebar — the left column. Your jumper: start a new session, or jump to any existing session in the current workspace.
• Pane — the large area on the right. It shows whatever you’ve navigated to. Today one pane fills the region; a later release will let it split.
• Breadcrumb — the trail at the top of the pane telling you where you are, with the current view’s actions beside it.

The header — global controls

The header is where you change context and reach app-wide settings. It stays the same no matter which view is in the pane.

• Workspace selector (left) — the dropdown naming your current workspace. Switch workspaces here, or add one. Everything below the header is scoped to the selected workspace.
• Skills / Tools (left, when a workspace is selected) — shortcuts that jump straight to the current workspace’s Skills and Tools tabs.
• Navigation arrows (center) — back and forward through the views you’ve visited, like a browser.
• Settings (right) — the gear icon. This is the fastest path to settings: it opens a menu with Appearance, System, and Workspaces Management. See Settings.

The sidebar — your session jumper

The sidebar always shows sessions across the whole current workspace — every project, every worktree — so it’s how you move between running work. It has two parts.

New session (top) — a short funnel of chips: project → worktree → agent. Set them, then press New Session. Choosing chips here only sets the target for the new session; it doesn’t change what’s in the pane until you start.

Sessions (below) — the list of everything in the workspace:

• Search filters by session title or project name.
• Group by switches between Project, a flat list, or Date.
• Sessions split into Active (recently touched) and Past.
• A liveness dot on each row shows whether that session is currently running.
• A row’s ⋯ menu holds per-session actions: fork, end, archive, delete.

Clicking a session opens it in the pane — even if it belongs to a different project than the one you’re currently viewing.

The pane — the current view

The pane renders whatever you’ve navigated to: a workspace’s tabs, a project, or a session’s chat. Its top is a breadcrumb bar — the location trail (starting from the Brisal logo, which returns you to your workspaces) plus the buttons relevant to the current view (for example, New Project).

When you open a workspace, the pane is organized into tabs:

Global vs. workspace-scoped controls

Where a control lives tells you how far its reach goes:

• Global controls sit in the header: switching workspaces, and the Settings menu (Appearance, System providers/agents/models, Workspaces Management). These apply across the whole app.
• Workspace-scoped controls live inside the pane — the workspace’s tabs (Projects, Providers, Agents, Sessions, Skills, Tools) — and in the header’s Skills/Tools shortcuts, which deep-link into those tabs. These apply only to the selected workspace.

The same kinds of things (providers, agents, models) exist at both levels: system-wide defaults live under Settings → System, and each workspace layers its own on top. See Settings for how that scope model works.

What to read next

This page is the map. The actual work of getting to a running session runs through several concepts in order — a workspace holds a provider, which offers models, which back an agent, which runs a session:

• Getting started — the full path from a fresh install to your first running session, in order.
• Workspaces — the top-level container everything else lives in.
• Providers → Models → Agents — the building blocks a session needs.
• Sessions — the chat itself, and its lifecycle.
• Settings — global vs. workspace scope in depth.