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UI Layout

How the Daintree window is laid out: the toolbar and its launcher, the sidebar, the panel grid, the dock, the portal, and multiple windows.

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Overview

A Daintree window is divided into five areas. Each one has a fixed job, and the boundaries between them do not move.

  • Toolbar: the top strip. Fixed anchors at the edges, the project switcher pill in the middle, and the launcher plus whatever you have pinned in between.
  • Sidebar: the left column, listing every worktree in the current project.
  • Panel grid: the center. Everything you are actually working in lives here. See Terminals & Panels.
  • Dock: the bottom bar. Panels you have moved out of the grid, still running.
  • Portal: an optional right-hand browser panel. See Portal Browser.
The toolbar, the worktree sidebar, and the panel grid. The dock bar appears once something is docked.

The worktree sidebar runs down the left edge. Toggle it with Command-B Control-B Control-B , drag its edge to resize it (350px by default), and the width persists across sessions. Pinned worktrees sit at the top and the QuickRun panel sits below the list.

What a card shows, how the list is sorted and filtered, and its full keyboard model are documented at Worktree Cards, which owns that surface.

Hiding the sidebar from the keyboard

A whole region of the window vanishing is alarming when nothing connects it to what you just pressed. So when Command-B Control-B Control-B hides the sidebar, Daintree raises a notice that names the combination that did it ("Sidebar hidden. Command-B Control-B Control-B toggles the sidebar") with an Undo button and a 30-second window to use it.

The notice fires in one direction only. Bringing the sidebar back is self-evidently what happened, so it says nothing. It fires only for a bare keypress: a menu item, a palette entry or a toolbar click already named itself at the moment you clicked. And it retires after three showings for a given binding, because by then it is a habit rather than a slip. Pressing Undo resets that count: reaching for Undo is the evidence the keypress was a slip.

The binding is read live, so if you have rebound the sidebar toggle the notice names your combination, not the default.

Panel grid

The panel grid holds every open panel for the selected worktree. Its layout strategies, scrolling behavior, tabs, maximize, focus mode and the empty-grid launcher all live on Terminals & Panels, which is the canonical page for the panel model.

One grid behavior belongs here because it is a launcher surface: right-clicking empty grid space opens the full launcher inventory inline, then a Grid Layout submenu (Automatic, Fixed Columns, Fixed Rows), then Terminal Settings…. It is the same inventory the toolbar + shows, rendered as menu items.

Portal

The Portal is a browser panel pinned to the right side of the window, for keeping a web chat, a set of docs or a dashboard next to your agents. Toggle it with Command-\ Control-\ Control-\ . It has a launchpad of detected AI chat services and its own tabs. See Portal Browser.

Palettes and menus

Every keyboard-driven overlay in Daintree (the action palette, the quick switcher, the launcher, the project switcher and every other one) runs on one shared surface with one grouped keyboard model. Right-click menus on panels, worktree cards and file rows are the pointer-driven half of the same job. Both have their own page: Palettes & Menus.

Status banners

Transient status messages across the workspace share one banner chrome. A snapshot restore notice, a degraded file watcher, a settings-sync conflict, a plugin that failed to load: same layout every time: a severity icon, a short title, a description line, and any actions inline on the right. The chrome is identical across the workspace, a panel and the settings dialog, so a banner means the same thing wherever it appears.

Severities are the standard set: error, warning, info, success and neutral. The close affordance is always in the same place, and a banner with an attached action puts the label inline rather than behind a menu. On Windows, the native caption strip tints to match whichever banner currently occupies the top band, so the window chrome and the banner read as one surface.

Toolbar, dock and windows

The chrome above and below the grid, plus what happens when you open a second window, is documented in one place: Toolbar, Dock and Windows. That covers toolbar customization and its groups, the launcher, overflow behavior, docking and undocking panels, and multi-window rules.