Skip to content
LoomWeaver

Workspaces

This is a guide, not the contract. What the platform guarantees is specified under openspec/specs/. For this page: workspaces. Where this page and a specification disagree, the specification is right, and that is a defect in this page: change the behaviour there, then explain it here.

This page explains what a workspace is and why rearranging the workbench is safe. The how-to pages linked at the end show the code.

A whole way of working

A workspace is not a saved layout file. It is which panes exist, what is open in them, which views are in the sidebars and which are hidden: a whole way of working, named. Exactly one is active at a time. It remembers what the user does to it, so leaving and coming back finds everything where it was left, and switching to another restores that one’s own arrangement without asking anything.

The baseline

Every workspace has a baseline, the arrangement it started from. Reset returns to it. That is what makes experimenting with the arrangement safe: nothing the user does to a workspace is more than one reset away from how it was declared or first saved.

A reset destroys hidden work, so it asks the unsaved-work question first, like every other action that would (Retention and unsaved work).

Two origins

A distribution ships workspaces with provideWorkspaces: a definition names the sidebar views and a nested content area of tabs, rows and columns, and a rail item can put one a click away. A workspace whose declaration the running product can no longer satisfy, because a plugin is gone, is marked rather than silently emptied.

The user saves their own. A saved workspace has no icon to declare, so the workbench derives a two-letter badge from its name, and only a colliding newcomer steps aside, so no existing badge is ever renamed.

The Workspaces dialog on its Mine tab, showing the Default workspace and a saved one named Month end marked as a variant of Sales, with save, rename, delete and reset controls.

The Workspaces dialog on its Mine tab, showing the Default workspace and a saved one named Month end marked as a variant of Sales, with save, rename, delete and reset controls.

The two origins in one dialog: what the demo provides sits under Provided, what the user saved under Mine, where Month end remembers it was derived from Sales.

A workspace in a tab

A container is the same idea one level down: an arrangement of child surfaces that belongs to one item the user picked, opened, moved and closed as a unit. See Containers.

Where to act on it