What is NEXUS?
NEXUS is a cross-platform, local-first agent workspace. It hosts command-line coding agents — Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, and the Chainabit CLI — in terminal sessions running on your own machine, and gives them shared surfaces to work on:
The navigation rail
The rail down the left edge switches between every destination in a workspace. In rail order:
| Destination | What it is |
|---|---|
| Repositories | The git worktrees reachable from your live sessions — branch, ahead/behind counts, and which session owns each. |
| Sessions | Terminal sessions and Bit pages in one type-badged list. A Bit page is a note surface that lives alongside terminals rather than in a separate place. |
| Files | A live on-disk tree rooted at the active session's working directory, for browsing, previewing and attaching files into a workspace. |
| Agents | The roster. Every agent's identity, persona, autonomy mode and capabilities, plus the shells it is running. |
| Neural Map | Your workspace as a navigable graph — agents, sessions, pages and files as connected nodes. |
| Room | One shared live space where agents, their terminal output and humans appear together, plus a live activity feed in its own context list. Start a team here. |
| AI Providers | The command-line agents Nexus can run — which are installed, which are enabled, and how each is configured. |
| Marketplace | Browse, install and manage plugins that extend the providers and agents above. |
| Canvas | A shared drawing surface where you and your agents sketch architecture, plans and diagrams together. |
Surfaces reached outside the rail
| Surface | How you reach it | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Stage | Toolbar, or ⌃⌘S | Every live agent at once, animated by its real activity state — a glanceable view of who is working. |
| Inspector | Toolbar, or ⌃⌘I | A selection-aware readout of whatever is selected, plus a system monitor. |
| Workspace Insights | Toolbar, or the Command Palette | Local-only analytics: contribution heatmaps, usage, and density trends. |
| Music | The New menu | A shared player pane — internet radio, Apple Music, or a YouTube link. |
| Settings | ⌘, | Ten sections covering everything above. See the Settings guide. |
The connective tissue
Three things cut across all of the above rather than living in one place:
| What it is | |
|---|---|
| Agent mesh | A local channel connected agents use to hand work to each other. Delivery is next-turn, not synchronous. |
| Pinned memory | Durable project rules and data mappings that every provider recalls next session, including anything an agent proposes for your approval. |
| Local MCP server | The developer-facing surface. It exposes the canvas, the agent mesh and workspace access to any hosted CLI as standard MCP tools. |
Platform availability
NEXUS began on macOS, which is the platform available today. Linux and Windows are coming. The protocols this documentation describes — the MCP surface, the canvas model, the agent mesh, and the configuration and path conventions — are defined without reference to any one operating system, so what you build against here carries forward unchanged as the other platforms arrive.
| Platform | Status |
|---|---|
| macOS | Available |
| Linux | Coming |
| Windows | Coming |
The developer-facing surface
NEXUS does not ask a connecting agent to learn a NEXUS-specific protocol. It exposes the canvas, the agent mesh, and workspace access through a local MCP (Model Context Protocol) server — a standard a hosted CLI agent already speaks. The agent calls MCP tools it understands; NEXUS is one more MCP server among however many the agent already has configured.
Two consequences follow from that design:
- Work stays on the machine. The MCP server communicates over stdio — the standard input and output of a local process — and opens no network port. There is nothing to expose to a network to use it.
- The cloud is scoped narrowly. NEXUS uses a cloud service only for account identity and entitlement checks. The canvas, the agent mesh, and the workspace file tree are local state; none of it round-trips through a server to be read or written.
Next
Continue to Install and first launch.
Where to go next
- Already have NEXUS running and signed in? Skip ahead to The workspace tour.
- Only need the protocol contract? Skip to Connect a CLI over MCP and First tool call.
- Want the reasoning behind the local-first design? Read Local-first and Architecture.