Core concepts

Ten words the rest of this documentation assumes. Read once; the vocabulary is small on purpose.

Workspace

A project folder you opened. Each workspace carries its own canvas, its own panels and its own git state. The recent-projects list in the sidebar switches between them.

Per-project state lives inside the project: .cate/workspace.json for the canvas layout and .cate/session.json for what was running.

Canvas

The infinite surface. Panels have coordinates in canvas space; the viewport converts them to screen space using the zoom level and the offset. Panning and zooming never move a panel — they move your view of it.

A canvas can also be a panel: a nested canvas inside the parent one.

Panel

One unit of work on the canvas. Seven types: terminal, editor, browser, canvas, agent, document and extension.

A panel either floats as a canvas node — title bar, drag handle, resize corners — or docks into a dock zone as a tab. The same panel record renders both ways, so moving it between the two loses nothing.

Dock

The fixed zones at the edges of the window. Drop a panel there and it becomes a tab; drag it back out and it returns to the canvas. Detached windows are dock windows, and their panels are synced back for session restore.

Agent

A coding agent running inside a terminal panel — claude, codex, or whichever CLI you launch. Catenary does not replace the agent; it gives it a place to live, a name on the canvas and wires to its peers.

Wire

A directed connection between two panels. It carries context: what the source produced becomes available to the destination. See connection wires.

Worktree / task

An isolated git worktree with its own branch and its own directory, created in one click. Its colour follows it through the sidebar, the dock tabs and its territory on the canvas. See 1-click worktrees.

Squad

A saved formation of agents: roles, presets and the wires between them. Load a squad and the whole team appears already connected.

Maestro Mode

Off by default. When you switch it on, one agent may recruit, brief and wire a team — and every action it takes stops at an editable approval card before anything appears on the canvas. See Maestro Mode.

Territory

The coloured island drawn under all the panels belonging to the same worktree. Optional — a switch in Settings, Worktrees ("Worktree Territories").