Tabs

Every tab is an independent workspace: its own transcript, its own command history, its own shell and working directory. Switching tabs never loses anything — a command running in one tab keeps running while you work in another, and each tab's scroll position and history stay where you left them.

A session starts with a single janus tab. New tabs are created on demand — agent tabs with the agent command (below), and view tabs by opening files, pages, or harnesses (see Tab Types).

A left and right sidebar flank the tab area, hidden until something is docked into them. Today the file navigator is the only tab that can dock — files left/files right opens (or moves) a tree straight into a sidebar, where it's resizable by dragging its inner edge.

Creating agent tabs

agent           create a tab with a random unused name
agent bilal     create a tab named "bilal"

The new tab is focused immediately. Names are always lowercased, and each must be unique — reusing one prints Agent "<name>" is already active. and creates nothing. Random names come from a pool of 52 (see Agents); if every pool name is taken, bare agent prints All agent names are in use.

Reading the tab strip

The strip tells you what every tab is doing without switching to it. Three signals matter:

• The colored dot. Every tab gets a dot color picked to stand apart from the colors already on screen, so adjacent tabs are easy to tell apart. The colored band along the top of a tab is its group.
• A blinking dot means busy. While a tab's agent is working — a shell command, an agent turn, anything in flight — its dot blinks on and off. It settles back to a steady fill when the work finishes.
• A flag icon means unread output. When an inactive tab receives new content — a message from another agent, a shell command finishing, agent output — a flag badge appears on it. Focusing the tab clears it. The active tab never shows one.

The active tab is also highlighted: full-strength text on the content background, while inactive tabs are muted.

The tab metadata row

Agent and harness tabs show a small metadata row above their body: the tab's working directory, followed by an emoji for each active flag (📦 workspaced, ⚡ auto-permitting). At the right of that row, agent and harness tabs also carry a 📁 file-navigator button (tooltip "Open file navigator here") — clicking it opens a file navigator rooted at that tab's working directory, docked in the left sidebar by default, or retargets an already-open navigator to that directory. Shell tabs don't show the 📁 button.

Switching and reordering

Shift+← / Shift+→ cycle through tabs; the next command switches to the next tab. Ctrl+← / Ctrl+→ move the current tab one position left or right — within its own group only (see Tab groups). With several tabs open, the tab navigator (Ctrl+G) jumps straight to any of them by typing part of its label or number.

Renaming a tab

rename <newname> gives the current tab a display alias — a name shown in the strip in place of its real label. Bare rename clears the alias. You can also double-click the label of the active tab and type a new name in place; Enter commits, Escape cancels.

The alias is display-only. Messaging, scheduling, and every other feature that targets a tab by name keeps using the original label, and the confirmation message reminds you of that. Aliases survive --relaunch.

Closing tabs

close             close the current tab
close bilal       close the tab named "bilal" (case-insensitive)
close page 2      close the embedded web page numbered 2

exit is an alias of close. Closing a tab tears down everything it owns — its shell, agent session, scheduled commands, and workspace clone if it has one — and focus moves to an adjacent tab.

Closing the last remaining tab quits the app. If you type close (or exit) on the last tab, the quit confirmation dialog appears first, exactly as if you'd typed quit; closing it via the tab strip's × button quits directly. If no tab matches the name you gave, an error is reported.

How paths are shown: $root

Wherever the app prints a filesystem path in a transcript, paths inside the directory you launched from are shortened to $root:

$root/src/cli.ts        = /Users/name/dev/project/src/cli.ts
$root/workspace/emrah   = a workspaced agent's clone, inside the project

Paths outside the project but under your home directory shorten to ~. This is display-only — the real absolute paths are what actually get used, and the raw output of your own shell commands is never rewritten.

Agent tool steps fold up

When an agent runs a series of tool steps, the transcript collapses each run into a single summary line — ▸ N tool steps (ctrl+t to expand) — so the conversation stays readable. Your prompt and the agent's final answer always stay visible. Press Ctrl+T to expand or collapse the steps for the current tab.