Focus Mode & the Gallery

Focus is a dedicated view: one session gets the full window with a real, typeable terminal — not a preview. A gallery of the other live sessions sits alongside it, so you can check on or jump to anything else without leaving Focus.

One full terminal, the gallery alongside

The input line always stays at the bottom of the terminal column — that’s where you type and answer 🟡 prompts. Only the gallery moves. It’s a separate strip (or rail) of the other sessions, each shown as a small item with a status dot and its last real terminal line, so you can tell at a glance whether flipping over is worth it.

Only live sessions appear in the gallery — claude, codex, kimi, or shell sessions that are still running. A session you’ve ended or archived drops out of the gallery, but stays reachable from the sidebar or history.

Switching from Normal to Focus and back keeps the same navigation state: tile order, selected session, chosen family member, project or group scope, and cockpit filters do not reset. Returning to vord with ⌘Tab likewise restores keyboard focus to the selected terminal without changing that state. vord chooses a replacement only when the selected session has ended or no longer belongs to the visible scope.

Terminal or conversation (the switch in the header)

A pill on the right of the session header switches the focus column between Terminal and Transcript. Transcript replaces the terminal with the session’s conversation — your prompts, the agent’s answers as real Markdown, and its tool steps — read straight from the agent’s own session file, so it reaches further back than the terminal’s scrollback and re-wraps at whatever width the window has right now. That last part is the point: agents hard-wrap their prose at the width they had when they wrote it, and no terminal can undo those breaks.

The pill sits there permanently rather than only on hover, because it’s the only visible sign that a second view exists. It appears for agent sessions with a conversation; shell and SSH sessions have no conversation and don’t get it. In a split, each side switches independently.

The conversation is read-only — you answer in the terminal, and tool output stays there too. Switching back remounts the terminal untouched; the session runs normally the whole time. Code starts with Terminal, while Cowork starts with Transcript. A choice you make is saved per session and survives restarts and work-mode changes. In Cowork, For you groups two or more adjacent tool steps into one line; a single step stays a one-liner. Protocol shows every step. This is one app-wide preference. Session cards in the cockpit have the same two views, but remember their choice separately — see Terminal or conversation on a tile.

Family strip under the terminal

In the gallery, each family appears as one framed block, with the parent first and visible children marked with ↳. The side rail also shows a child count. Children stay in their parent’s project block.

When the session on screen belongs to a family — it started other agents, or it is one of those agents — the same strip the cockpit tile uses sits directly under the terminal. With the gallery at the bottom, the strip is between the terminal and the gallery. The parent is the top row. Each child row begins with ↳. Every row has its own status dot, and the row you are looking at is highlighted.

On the right of each row: the agent and its model (for example Codex · gpt-6-luna), a status word (working, waiting for you, ended), and how long that session has been running.

A session with no children shows no strip, and the terminal keeps its full height.

Up to five rows stay visible. Further members scroll inside the strip. When a child starts waiting, the strip brings that row into view on its own. The family order stays as it is.

Click a row to show that member in the terminal. The strip stays, including while a child is the one on screen. Click the parent row to come back. In a split, the strip follows the selected session — the left terminal — and spans the width under both columns.

The cockpit tile keeps the shorter strip (title and status dot only, four rows before it scrolls). See Child Sessions.

Flipping between sessions (arrows, ⌘←/⌘→, click)

Way to flip	What it does
Click a gallery item	Selects that session and brings it into the terminal
Chevron buttons at either end of the gallery (left/right on a horizontal strip, up/down on the right-hand rail)	Steps to the previous/next item, wrapping around at either end
`⌘←` / `⌘→`	Same step, from anywhere in the window — not just while the gallery has focus

While a virtual folder is selected, the chevrons and ⌘← / ⌘→ only step through that folder’s sessions and never jump to a session outside it.

The gallery order never changes while you’re browsing it: sessions are ordered by when they started, so neither a status change elsewhere nor a different sort axis in the cockpit reshuffles the item you’re about to click into next. The gallery always behaves this way, with no setting to turn it off.

Opening a second session in a split (double-click a gallery item)

Double-clicking a gallery item — instead of a single click — opens that session in a second column to the right, so two terminals run side by side and both stay typeable at once. A single click still just selects. The same action is also available from a gallery item’s context menu (“Open on the right in split”).

This is a quick way into two-up view; the full mechanics — swapping sides, closing one side without ending its session, and the two-column-only limit — are covered on Split View & Session Naming.

Gallery position (top/bottom/right/hidden) and when it hides itself

Settings → Workspace → Sessions & Opening has a gallery position choice:

Position	Where it sits
Bottom (default)	A horizontal strip below the terminal, under the input line
Top	A horizontal strip between the termhead and the terminal
Right	A vertical rail beside the terminal
Hidden	No gallery at all — flip with `⌘←`/`⌘→` only

The setting only decides where the gallery would sit — vord hides it automatically in two cases, regardless of what you’ve picked:

Only one live session exists. There’s nothing to browse to, so an empty strip would just waste space.
A right-hand panel is open (the Git inspector, the browser/preview panel, or notes). The gallery steps aside so the terminal keeps the full width; flipping still works via ⌘←/⌘→.

The terminal’s own position never moves — only the gallery does. This is the same Sessions pane that decides where a freshly started session lands (Focus, Normal, Compact, or keep the current view); see Three View Densities for that half of the setting, and Settings Reference for the full pane list.

If the gallery mixes sessions from more than one project — the “all sessions” scope with two or more projects represented — it groups them into a project capsule per project, in the same order projects appear in the sidebar. A single project’s sessions render flat, with no capsule header.

Inside each project, sessions are further split into three status blocks in a fixed order: waiting (🟡) first, then working (🟢), then idle (⚪️), separated by a thin divider rather than a label. Children appear directly after their parent and carry a ↳ marker; each family stays together in the status block of its most urgent member. Flipping with the arrows or ⌘←/⌘→ follows this exact visible order — capsule by capsule, block by block — so browsing never jumps across a project boundary or a status divider out of sequence.

Focus mode with the gallery strip at the bottom, showing other live sessions