Dashboard & Workspaces

The dashboard is the home screen of the web app: a workspace sidebar on the left, the active session in the main pane, and a top bar with global actions. This page covers the layout, creating a session, and keeping a long session list under control. For running the server and auth, see the Web Dashboard overview.

The dashboard with the workspace sidebar, session summary, and status glyphs

Layout

  • Workspace sidebar (left) lists every session grouped by repo, with a live status glyph per row. On phones it collapses behind a top-bar toggle. With no sessions, it shows a hint and a New session button.
  • Main pane shows the selected session: the agent terminal (or structured view), with the diff and paired terminal reachable from the top bar.
  • Top bar carries the command-palette trigger, the right-panel picker, and the overflow (three-dot) More options menu.
  • Home screen (no session selected) shows the AoE logo and a count of running, waiting, and error sessions.

Status glyphs

Each sidebar row carries an animated braille glyph encoding the session’s state: a spinner of dots while Running, an orbiting dot while Waiting or Creating, a slow breathe while Starting or freshly idle. Errors render in the error color. The frame is offset by each session’s creation time so rows don’t pulse in lockstep.

Creating a session

The New session wizard walks four steps:

  • Project: pick the working directory from recent and registered projects, or start a scratch session with no path.
  • Session: set the title (auto-slugifies into a worktree branch name unless you edit the branch), or attach an existing branch instead.
  • Agent: select the tool and profile, plus per-session knobs (auto-approve / YOLO mode, “Run in a safe container” sandbox, command override, extra args / env).
  • Review: confirm before the session spawns.

Choosing a profile seeds the agent-step defaults. If you have already edited a field, switching profiles asks before overwriting it.

Command palette

The command palette (top-bar button or keyboard shortcut) is a fuzzy launcher for global actions: jump to a session, open settings, start a new session, toggle the right panel.

First-run onboarding

The first time you open the dashboard in a browser, a Choose your theme card appears before anything else. Picking a theme applies it live and saves it to your default profile; you can switch freely, then click Continue. Change it later in Settings > Appearance. The card is skipped in read-only mode and for anyone who already finished the tutorial.

After the theme card, an interactive walkthrough highlights the major regions (command bar, sidebar, starting a session, settings, and inside a session the diff panel and composer). Each step lists its keyboard shortcuts and has a Skip button.

Completing or skipping the tour records app_state.has_seen_web_tour on the server, so it does not relaunch on reload or on another device pointed at the same server. To replay it, open the overflow menu and choose Show tutorial; re-triggering adapts to where you are (dashboard regions, or composer / mode picker / send controls inside a session). It does not auto-launch on touch devices, where it is menu-only.

By default the sidebar shows your manually-ordered list. Drag a row (press-and-hold) to move it; the order persists across browsers and devices via workspace-ordering.json. To reorder whole projects, drag a project/group header by its left-side handle; this group order is per-browser (localStorage), not synced. Group drag is disabled while a filter is active or a computed sort mode is selected.

A sort picker next to the filter button offers three modes:

  • Manual (default): keeps your drag-ordered list, drag enabled.
  • Recent activity: orders by the most recent of last_accessed_at, idle_entered_at, and created_at across each workspace’s sessions, descending.
  • Attention: floats sessions needing a human to the top, mirroring the TUI’s Attention sort. Ranks by status (Waiting, Error, Idle, Unknown, Running, Stopped, transient states last); sessions flagged urgent via the attention-urgent hook rise above non-urgent rows in their tier, favorited rows come first within a status rank, ties break by most-recent activity.

Drag-to-reorder is disabled in the computed modes. The picker’s state is per-browser (localStorage), not synced and not tied to your profile. The Multi-repo and Scratch groups default to the bottom; in manual mode you can drag them anywhere, in computed modes they stay at the bottom.

A grouping toggle (layers icon) next to the sort toggle cycles the axis. Each click advances By repo to By group to By repo and group and back:

  • By repo (default): groups by git repository.
  • By group: groups by the user-defined group assigned in the TUI rename dialog, with aoe group move, or via Edit group below. Ungrouped sessions fall into an Ungrouped bucket pinned to the bottom.
  • By repo and group: repository headers with user groups nested inside each. A session split across groups appears once per subgroup.

The choice is per-browser (localStorage). Collapse state is tracked separately per axis. You can move a session between groups from the web context menu, but group rename, color, and drag-reorder live on the repo axis only.

Edit group. Right-click (long-press on touch) a session row and choose Edit group: type an existing group to move it, a new path to create that group, or clear the field to drop it back to Ungrouped. Group paths use / for hierarchy (e.g. work/projects). Hidden in read-only mode.

Triage: pin, archive, snooze

The right-click (long-press on touch) context menu on any session row exposes three triage primitives:

  • Pin: floats the workspace to the top in every sort mode. Pin is web-only and distinct from the favorite mark (a within-tier Attention signal on both surfaces). Renders as a pushpin glyph.
  • Archive: kills the session’s tmux pane (or shuts down the structured-view worker for ACP sessions) and sinks the row into the collapsible “Snoozed & archived” footer. Sending a message wakes it back into the live list. Daemon restarts skip archived sessions.
  • Snooze: sinks the row for a chosen duration (presets: 1h, 2h, 3h, 4h, 5h, 6h, 1d, 1w). Wakes when the timer expires; sending a message wakes it early.

Snooze and archive are mutually exclusive with pin (pinning a sunk row surfaces it; archiving or snoozing a pinned row removes the pin). The “Snoozed & archived” section sits at the bottom and aggregates every sunk workspace; collapsed by default, its state persists in localStorage. The three menu entries are hidden in read-only mode.

Multi-select and bulk triage

Select multiple rows to act on the whole selection:

  • Cmd/Ctrl+click: toggle a row in or out of the selection without navigating.
  • Shift+click: select every visible row between the last clicked and this one (collapsed groups and an active filter trim the range).
  • Plain click: clears the selection and opens that session.

With a selection active, a bulk action bar shows the count and applicable actions, split by the rows they affect (e.g. Pin 3 alongside Unpin 2). Bulk actions are best-effort: each session updates independently and the bar reports a summary, then clears the selection. The selection survives collapse and filter changes but is not saved across reloads. Hidden in read-only mode.

Profiles

The Profiles entry in the sidebar footer opens /profiles for managing configuration profiles: a left rail lists every profile with a default badge; the detail panel lets you create, rename, delete, set the default, and edit a description. Edit configuration buttons deep-link into the matching Settings tab scoped to that profile (/settings/<tab>?profile=<name>).

Lifecycle hooks are shown read-only here, each labeled with its source (profile override, an override disabling inherited commands, inherited global commands, or none). Hooks run arbitrary shell commands, so they are never writable from the web; edit them in your config file or the TUI. The same applies to the agent-command and environment fields. In read-only mode the create / rename / delete / set-default / description controls are hidden.

On mobile

Below the md breakpoint the dashboard shows a single full-viewport pane instead of the desktop split. The right-panel button opens a picker that swaps the main pane between Agent terminal, Diff, and Paired terminal; a back chip in the diff and paired views returns to the agent terminal. The agent terminal and paired shell stay alive in the background when you switch away, preserving scrollback and focus.