The Workspace Tour
Everything in NEXUS is reached from one icon rail on the left edge of the window. This page walks it top to bottom.
1. Look at the rail
NEXUS opens on Sessions by default. The rail holds nine modes, always in the same order:
| Icon rail mode | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Repositories | The git repositories reachable from your workspace's live sessions. |
| Sessions | Terminal sessions and bit pages together, in one list. |
| Files | The workspace's file tree. |
| Agents | The agent roster — see Create your first agent. |
| Neural Map | Your workspace as a graph — see The Neural Map. |
| Room | Agents, terminal TUIs and humans sharing one live space — see The Nexus Room. |
| AI Providers | Every command-line AI NEXUS knows how to run, whether it's detected on your machine, and whether it's enabled. This is the same list an agent's own default-provider picker draws from. |
| Marketplace | Browse, install, and manage extensions for your providers and agents. |
| Canvas | A shared drawing surface you and your agents can both edit — see the Canvas guide. |
You will see: clicking a rail icon swaps the column beside it (the context list) and the main content area to match that mode. Most modes show a primary action at the bottom of the context list — New Session, Attach File, New Agent, or New Canvas — for the one thing you most often create there.
2. Click through each mode once
Click each icon in turn. Repositories, Neural Map, Room, AI Providers, and Marketplace are browse-only surfaces with no creation action of their own; the rest let you create something directly.
Sessions is worth a second look: it unifies terminal sessions and bit pages — short, titled notes you can capture from a terminal's own gear menu (Capture ▸ Selection → Bit Page) — into a single, filterable list rather than splitting them into separate modes. A bit page's own settings include a Lifecycle section for archiving; it is not built yet in this release, so a page you create today isn't archived or recycled by anything.
3. Hints arrive where they apply
There is no chain of tips to sit through. NEXUS shows a small number of first-encounter hints, each triggered the first time you open the surface it describes rather than all at once when you start — so the Neural Map hint waits until you open the Neural Map, and the Room hint waits until you enter the Room. Each one can be dismissed and none of them blocks anything.
Where a surface is empty, the surface teaches itself: a blank Neural Map, an empty memory list, or a Room with no agents each explains what fills it and links to the longer explanation. That is deliberate — the explanation appears at the moment it becomes useful instead of before you have anything to apply it to.
Two more things worth knowing on the way in:
- Some surfaces unlock later. Delegating tasks and creating teams stay out of reach until one of your agents has survived a restart, because that is the moment persistent identity stops being a claim and becomes something you have seen. The gate states this reason where it appears, and Settings can turn it off if you would rather see everything at once.
- There is a demo workspace. It comes pre-populated with agents, memories, a small map, and one finished delegation, so you can look at a working system before building your own. Open it from the welcome flow, or later from Help ▸ Open Demo Workspace; Help ▸ Remove Demo Workspace takes it all back out again.
You can replay the welcome flow anytime from Settings ▸ General ▸ Restart Tour.
Next
Continue to Create your first agent.
Where to go next
- Window & Panes — what can occupy the space beside the rail, and how it's arranged.
- Settings guide — the General section's Restart Tour action, and everything else App Settings covers.