Pane Types
A pane in NEXUS's grid holds one of four things: a terminal, a bit page, a canvas preview, or the music player. This page covers each, and the one pane kind that can flip between two different views without losing what's running underneath.
Terminal
A terminal pane runs a shell — either a bare shell you type into yourself, or a configured CLI agent, depending on how the agent it belongs to is set up. See Running & monitoring for starting one and reading its live status.
Terminal or Agent & Skills
A terminal pane running an agent can show either its Terminal view or an Agent & Skills view, switched from the pane's own session menu, or by drilling into an agent from the Neural Map — there's no keyboard shortcut for the flip. Switching only changes what's displayed — the underlying shell and whatever it's running keep going in the background, scrollback intact, so flipping back to Terminal shows exactly where you left it.
Agent & Skills is read-only plus a set of actions, not an editor:
| Part | Shows |
|---|---|
| Identity header | The agent's name and avatar. |
| Persona card | Role, Focus, Communication style, Tools, and Context Tags, view-only, with an Edit Persona… action that hands off to the agent's own page. |
| Runtime card | Live status, process ID, working directory, CPU, and memory. |
| Identity Hub card | Reveal the agent's home folder on disk, and its linked skills. |
| Actions card | New shell, edit, duplicate, restart, and close — plus a link back to the Terminal view. |
Bit page
A bit page is a short, titled note that lives in a pane alongside your terminals, rather than in a separate note-taking surface. Capture one directly from a terminal's own gear menu (Capture ▸ Selection → Bit Page), or create one from scratch. Its header shows a "BIT" badge, its name (renamed inline from the pane's own gear menu), and a running word count once it holds any text — the count covers everything in the bit, not just what's currently scrolled into view. The body itself is a plain monospaced text editor, with a drop zone below it for attaching files.
Its own contextual settings cover title and accent color — see Contextual settings — and note that its Lifecycle (archive and recycle) section isn't built yet.
Canvas preview
A canvas preview pane is a forced-read-only glance at the shared collaborative canvas, labeled with a "CANVAS · READ-ONLY" badge in its header. Its Open in Canvas button hands off to the real, editable surface reached from the Canvas rail mode — the same underlying canvas, but a genuinely separate, editable view; see the Canvas guide for the model agents use to read and write it. The canvas itself is not yet a splittable window pane in its own right, which is why this pane kind exists as a preview rather than a second, independent editing surface.
Music player
NEXUS has one shared music player pane, with three source tabs:
| Tab | What it offers |
|---|---|
| Stations | Internet radio — play/pause, stop, a form to add a station, and a list to switch between them. |
| Apple Music | Playback controls — previous, play/pause, next, a scrub slider, and volume where supported — for audio already playing on your Mac. |
| YouTube | Paste a link to play its video, embedded, with play/pause. |
Only one instance of the player exists across all of NEXUS at any time, and it isn't scoped to any single workspace — it shows up as a pane in whichever workspace you're currently viewing, rather than staying tied to the one you opened it from, so playback keeps going as you switch workspaces or windows.
Where to go next
- Splitting & Focus — how a pane like any of the above gets created and arranged.
- Workspaces — dragging a session onto a workspace tab to reassign it.
- Agents — persona, autonomy, and providers for whatever's running in a terminal pane.
- Canvas — the full editing model behind a canvas preview pane.
- Contextual settings — the settings panel for a bit page, a file, or whatever else a pane is showing.