Tabs

A tab is an agent#

A tab is not a view of the same conversation: it is a separate agent, with its own workspace, its own core task, its own session and its own composer. Switching tabs switches who you are talking to. Nothing is suspended — a background tab’s turn keeps streaming, its tools keep running, and its chat fills in while you work somewhere else. The desktop notification for a finished turn still fires from a tab you are not looking at.

The strip is one row and only appears once there is something to choose between; a single-tab session paints exactly as it did before tabs existed. An entry reads <number> <label>, the label being the session’s title or — before there is a session — the workspace directory’s name, with a ● while that agent is busy. The active entry is the one with a background. When the strip does not fit, the window is anchored on the active tab and the dropped runs collapse to ….

Opening and closing#

• /newtab [path] opens another agent. Without a path it inherits the active tab’s workspace, which makes it the way to get a second conversation in the same project; a path runs it somewhere else. ~ expands, and a relative path resolves against the directory shuvarie was started in — a tab never moves the process’s working directory, since that would move the ground under every other tab.
• /closetab stops the tab’s agent: a turn still streaming is cancelled (it must not keep talking, and billing, with nowhere to deliver), and its LSP servers and MCP connections stop with it.
• The last tab stays open — closing it would leave nothing to draw, so /closetab says so instead; /quit is what exits the program.

Switching#

Key	Action
Alt+← / Alt+→	Cycle back / forward, wrapping at the ends
Alt+1 … Alt+9	Jump to that position in the strip

Both are gated on there being more than one tab, so with a single tab every chord the composer had before tabs existed is still the composer’s.

What is per tab, what is shared#

Per tab, because it belongs to a workspace:

• the working directory every tool resolves against, run_shell’s default cwd, the context files, and the permission rules built on that root;
• the config chain — so /scene offers that project’s scenes, and a new session starts under that tab’s default scene;
• the session store (<workspace>/.shuvarie/ or the shared global one), the conversation, the composer draft and its pending attachments.

Shared, because it belongs to you:

• connections.kdl — one active provider and model, so the sidebar can never show a model the turn did not run on;
• the ui prefs (theme, sidebar, notifications), the command menu, the model and theme pickers, and the Selune catalog.

Commands follow that split. Connection and preference commands — /model, /provider, /variant, /theme, /reload and friends — reach every tab’s agent, so a background tab does not keep running on a model its sidebar no longer shows. Session commands — a send, /undo, /tree, /compact, /export — go to the tab on screen.

Trust#

Opening a tab never prompts: a key press must not yank the terminal into a dialog. The workspace’s recorded trust decision is used when it has one, and otherwise the tab inherits the grants the startup workspace was given.

Limits#

• Tabs are process state: there is no restoring them across restarts. -c and -s resume one session into the first tab.
• Each tab is a full agent — its own LSP manager and MCP connections, started lazily. An idle tab is cheap; a tab that has used lsp or an MCP server holds those resources until it is closed.