Workspaces
A workspace is the top-level container in Brisal. Everything you work with — your projects, the providers and models behind your agents, the agents and skills themselves, your sessions, even the theme — lives inside a workspace.
Its job is to compartmentalize. A freelancer juggling several clients, or one machine shared between work and private life, can keep each world’s code and its LLM providers, licenses, and agents behind a wall, with no bleed between them. Most people create a single workspace and never think about it again. The feature exists for the people who need that wall.
What’s inside the wall
A workspace is a self-contained world. Everything below is scoped to the selected workspace — nothing is shared with another workspace:
| Walled per workspace | |
|---|---|
| Projects | The repositories and folders you work in |
| Providers | The LLM services you’ve configured, including their keys |
| Models | The models you’ve set up against those providers |
| Agents | The agents available to run sessions |
| Skills & Tools | What those agents can reach for |
| Sessions | The chats themselves |
| Theme | The workspace’s own palette and appearance |
The rule is simple: if something isn’t isolated between workspaces, that’s a bug. Two workspaces never see each other’s projects or provider keys.
Alongside your workspaces, Brisal ships a System layer of built-in, non-configurable providers, models, agents, and skills — think of them as templates. Every workspace can draw on those built-ins; how each concept builds on the System layer is covered on its own page (Providers, Agents, Skills).
The single-workspace user
If you only ever need one workspace, it stays out of your way. There’s no concept of a “current profile” to manage — you make a workspace once, and it’s simply the container everything lives in.
Brisal doesn’t seed a workspace for you, so the very first thing you’ll do is create one. After that, the workspace selector always sits in the header, even with a single entry, so switching is always one click away if you ever add a second.
The Workspaces index
You manage your workspaces from the Workspaces index — the page listing every workspace as a card, each with its own Select, Edit, Archive, and Delete actions. Reach it from anywhere in the app by clicking the Brisal logo at the start of the breadcrumb, at the top of the pane. Its + New Workspace button (top-right) opens the new-workspace form.
Creating a workspace
On a fresh install the pane shows a No Workspaces card with a Create Your First Workspace button. You can also reach the new-workspace form any time from:
- the + New Workspace button on the Workspaces index, or
- the + Add workspace entry in the header’s workspace selector.
The form asks for three things:
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Name (required) | 3–50 characters; letters, numbers, spaces, hyphens, and underscores |
| Description | Optional free text |
| Tags | Optional comma-separated labels for organizing workspaces |
Creating a workspace automatically selects it, so you land ready to add your first project.
A workspace card on the index: the Selected badge, its action buttons, and a count of what it contains.
Selecting and switching
The selected workspace is the one you’re working in — the workspace whose projects and sessions you create and see. Exactly one workspace is selected at a time, and everything below the header is scoped to it.
You can tell which one is selected in two places: the header selector names it, and its card on the Workspaces index carries a green Selected badge. When a workspace is selected, the header also grows Skills and Tools shortcuts that jump into that workspace’s tabs.
To switch, pick another workspace from the header selector, or press Select on its card in the index. Selecting a different workspace swaps your entire context — the sidebar’s sessions, the available agents, the theme.
Renaming a workspace
Open the Workspaces index, press Edit on the workspace’s card, and change its name, description, or tags. Renaming only changes what you see; it doesn’t move or affect the projects inside.
Archiving a workspace
Each card has an Archive action for setting a workspace aside. Today archiving is a lightweight marker with no further effect — the workspace stays in place. It’s intended to grow into a way to declutter the selector and skip loading workspaces you’re not using.
Deleting a workspace
Delete a workspace from the Delete action on its card in the index. You cannot delete the selected workspace — select a different one first. (This means your only workspace can’t be deleted until you’ve made a second one to select.)
What to read next
A workspace is just the container; the work happens through what it holds. The path 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: