Working

Workspaces, tabs and projects

A workspace holds your sessions and shows them as a tiled grid, free-floating windows or tabs. Local folders you work in are kept separately as Projects.

Workspaces

A workspace is a container for open sessions - hosts you've connected to and local folders you've opened. Synapse starts with one, "Workspace 1", and workspaces appear as a row of tabs at the top of the window. Each workspace remembers its own layout; switching workspaces switches what's on screen instantly.

• New workspace - the "+" button next to the workspace tabs, or "New workspace" in the command palette (Ctrl+K).
• Rename - double-click a workspace tab, or its options menu (the ⋯ button) > Rename.
• Colour - the options menu also offers a colour dot (blue, emerald, amber, rose, purple, cyan, orange, zinc, or none) to tell workspaces apart at a glance.
• Delete workspace - options menu > Delete workspace (only shown once you have more than one). If it holds sessions that can keep running, Synapse asks whether to keep them in the background or end them, the same choice as closing a session below.

Open sessions aren't restored when Synapse restarts - workspaces themselves are, but you reconnect to hosts and reopen folders yourself.

Layouts

Each workspace shows its sessions in one of three ways, chosen from the layout switcher in the header:

In a tiled layout, drag a pane's title bar onto another pane to swap them, or onto the snap bar that appears while dragging to re-split the workspace into that arrangement. Drag a host or project from the sidebar onto an occupied workspace to choose exactly where the new pane lands.

Tabs

Switch a workspace to the Tabs layout to work through many sessions one at a time:

• Click a tab to switch to it; the others stay running in the background with their scrollback intact.
• Double-click a tab, or press F2, to rename it.
• Drag a tab to reorder it.
• Middle-click a tab to close it.
• Drop a host, project or background session from the sidebar onto the tab strip to open it as a new tab.
• The "+" button on the strip opens the command palette (or "Add host" if you have none yet) to add a tab.

Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab move between tabs, Ctrl+1 to Ctrl+9 jump straight to one, and Ctrl+Shift+W closes the current tab. See Keyboard shortcuts for the full list and how to rebind them.

Projects

Every local folder you open (rather than an SSH host) is tracked as a project and listed under Projects in the sidebar, on this device only. A project remembers its path and when you last opened it, so you can get back to a folder without hunting for it.

• Click a project to open it, or bring an already-open one back into view.
• Drag a project onto the workspace grid to place it exactly where you want.
• Right-click (or its ⋯ menu) for Open in a new pane, Rename, Reveal in Explorer, Copy path, End background session and Remove from list.
• Projects also appear in the command palette, in their own group.

Keeping sessions running in the background

Closing a local project's pane, an SSH session, or a whole workspace doesn't have to end it. Synapse can keep the shell, its scrollback, tunnels and any agents running in the background instead - the project or host shows as "Running" in the sidebar, and clicking it brings the session straight back into a pane, exactly as you left it.

Choose what happens by default in Settings > Terminal > "When closing a session": ask each time, always keep it running in the background, or always end it.