Workspace layout and panels

The main window is an IDE-style layout: navigation on the left, a tabbed center area, optional side panels, and an optional bottom terminal.

Title bar

The main window uses a custom title bar (no native OS caption or window buttons) so the chrome looks the same on Windows, Linux, and macOS:

Owl logo on the left (embedded in the app).
Application menu (File, View, Workspace, …) in the same strip.
Minimize, maximize, and close on the right, drawn by the LCA theme.
Drag the title bar (logo area, menu background, or empty space to the right of the menus) to move the window. Double-click that area to maximize or restore.
Resize by dragging the outer edge of the main window. On Windows, the OS handles this natively. On macOS (Cocoa), the window uses AppKit resizable unified chrome. On Linux (GTK2), the app tracks the pointer to move or resize the frameless window; GTK3 builds can use the toolkit’s native move/resize when available.

After installing a build on Linux or macOS, verify that you can move the window from the title strip, use min/max/close, and resize from the window edges on your platform. Detached panels still use the normal system title bar on their floating windows.

Navigation rail

The narrow left activity bar switches views:

Workspace — workspace overview.
Projects — file tree for the workspace.
Agents — chat session list (active and archived).
Bots — agent presets and prompt setups.
Tools & Logs — per-step execution log for the active session: user prompts, model steps (Step N/M · Model:), and each tool’s input/output. Click a row to open Execution Detail; during an active run new rows follow into that panel until you select an older row.
Tasks & Plans — session task list from the todo tool.
Tool Errors — failed tool calls for the active session (click a row for full arguments and output). The subtitle shows the on-disk log path; hover for the full path.

A horizontal rule on the rail separates Future Features (roadmap placeholders with no backend yet). Each opens a panel with a bold COMING SOON banner. See the site roadmap for Multi-Agent Workspace, Execution Plans, Workspace Knowledge Base, and The Brain. The same entries appear under Workspace → Future Features in the menu.

Icons are tooltipped; the active rail button stays down (speed-button group).

Tool error log file

Failures are also appended to tool-errors.log under the same user config folder as chat sessions (lazycodingagent beside session storage). The path is resolved at runtime on Windows, Linux, and macOS. The file is JSONL (one JSON object per line). Clearing the panel only clears the in-memory list for the current session; delete the file manually if you want to reset the on-disk history.

Center area

The center header tab strip switches three pages (no + on this strip):

Chat — a session tab strip under the page header lists every non-archived chat (+ for new session, ✕ to archive). Below that: conversation history rendered as Markdown (headings, bold, code, lists — subset, not full GFM), current session label, composer, mode and model combos, Stop and Run.
Editor — one editor buffer for the file you opened from Projects (prompted to save if dirty before replacing). Font size scales with display DPI.
Markdown — formatted preview when you open a .md file and choose Preview (same HTML renderer as chat). Choose Source to edit in the Editor tab.

There are no per-file editor tabs. Switch sessions from the Chat session tabs or Sessions in the nav rail; open another file from Projects.

Right and utility panels

Guidelines / instructions — workspace context on the right when enabled.
Utility panel — pages for Scratchpad, Execution Detail, and Plan. Toggle via Window → Panels → Utility Panel. Execution Detail renders formatted HTML: accent section headers, highlighted tool names, shaded JSON blocks, and prose blocks for long prompt text. Plan shows the saved plan path, a model picker and Build in the header, and rendered plan markdown in the body.

Panel visibility and detach

Use ✕ on navigation, guidelines, utility, or terminal panel headers, or Window → Panels, to show or hide those areas. The center (chat / editor / markdown) area has ⧉ detach on its header but no ✕ — hide the chat panel from Window → Panels only. Layout and visibility persist when you restart the app.

Use ⧉ on navigation, chat, guidelines, utility, and terminal headers to detach the panel into a floating window (position and size are saved). Close the float window or click ⧉ again to re-dock.

Terminal

View → Terminal opens a bottom dock with a real shell in the workspace root. Resize with the splitter above the status bar. On Linux, the embedded terminal needs PTY support; Windows requires Windows 10 1809+ for ConPTY per application README.

Theme

View → Toggle Light / Dark Theme switches the in-app palette. The application menu lives in the custom title bar on all platforms—not the macOS screen menu bar. Lists, memos, combos, menu dropdowns, and markdown preview areas follow the active theme. Scrollbars on scrollable controls follow the OS widget theme where applicable.

Tips

Use splitters between panels to resize.
Combo height is set in the Lazarus form (chat footer, plan header, Settings). Theme styling does not override that size; if a combo looks wrong after a resize, try toggling theme once.