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Getting started

Introduction

Catenary is the IDE for coding agents: a desktop app with two lenses on the same work. On the Canvas, an infinite canvas you can zoom, terminals, editors, browsers and coding agents are not tabs stacked in a rail — they are panels that float in space, side by side, where you put them. TerminalMap shows the same work as keyboard-driven terminal splits with a session switcher; ⌥⌘S switches between the two, and nothing restarts.

It exists for one shape of work: running several AI coding agents at once (Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity) without losing track of what each of them is doing.

What it is

A native application (Electron + Chromium) that opens a folder on your machine and gives you:

  • an infinite canvas you pan and zoom, with panels positioned in canvas space;
  • terminals backed by a real PTY, where you run claude, codex, or anything else;
  • Monaco, the editor from VS Code, with side-by-side diffs of what an agent changed;
  • browser panels to watch your dev server while the agent edits it;
  • wires that carry context from one panel into an agent;
  • git worktrees created in one click, so three experiments run in parallel without touching each other.

What it is not

It is not a cloud service. Catenary does not run a model, does not proxy your prompts, and has no account system. The agents you run are the CLIs you already have installed, using the API keys you already pay for; the built-in Catenary Agent uses the provider keys you give it.

Local-first, by construction

  • No account. Nothing to sign up for.
  • No telemetry. The app opens no analytics connection.
  • Your API keys stay on your machine and are never routed through us.
  • The Pro licence is verified by a locally checked Ed25519 signature. An unconfirmed seat can grant temporary Pro for 30 days; while that Pro is active, activation retries automatically on launch. Confirmed Pro is checked locally, without periodic server revalidation.

Canvas state lives in the project you opened, at .cate/workspace.json and .cate/session.json. Close the folder, reopen it, and everything comes back where you left it.

Where to go next

If you have not installed it yet, start with the installation guide. If it is already running, core concepts is the shortest path to the vocabulary the rest of this documentation uses.

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