Panels overview

There are five ways to put a panel on the canvas:

• The Add island: a glass pill beside the voice center at the bottom of the window, holding a quick-spawn strip (editor, terminal, browser, note and New task) and the Panel Library button. The left rail itself is Spaces only, your workspace tiles.
• Panel Library (Cmd/CtrlShiftE): browse the catalog in a searchable grid, grouped into All, Core, Media, Dev, Productivity, Ambient and Custom Embed, plus a Community tab marked coming soon. Some entries (browsers, embeds, agent CLIs) offer a small config form right in the picker.
• Command Palette (Cmd/CtrlK): type New Terminal, New Browser, and so on.
• Right-click the canvas: a Create menu with New task, New Terminal, New Editor, New Browser and New Sticky Note, a Pinned submenu of the panel types you have pinned from the Library, a Panel Library entry, and Paste.
• Double-click empty canvas: a compact panel palette appears where you clicked and spawns the panel at that exact spot: an editor, terminal, browser, note, an agent task, or the full Library.

The everyday tools you build with. Each has its own page in these docs:

• New task: the leading card in Core. It opens the draft task composer, where you describe a job, pick the agent and send it off.
• Terminal: a real shell with a smart action bar and agent-session resume.
• Code Editor: a Monaco-powered editor with a file tree and tabs.
• Git: stage, diff, commit and manage branches.
• File Explorer: a git-aware tree of your project.
• Browser: an embedded web view for docs, previews and dashboards.
• Projects: a list of recent projects for quick switching.
• Source Control, Checks and Explorer: line-aware views of your commit history, PR checks and file tree. They open from the Command Palette or the notebook, not from the Library.

Beyond New task, the Core category also carries first-class cards for Claude Code, Codex and opencode. Each one opens a real terminal already running that CLI in your project, titled after the agent rather than “Terminal 3”, with an optional auto-approve toggle in the card’s config form.

Two panels exist for supervising agents that are already running, rather than for starting new ones:

• Inbox: the board. One row per supervised thread and provider session, ordered so whatever needs you appears first.
• Thread: a full-height chat view of a single thread, with its transcript, its approval cards and its composer.

Neither is in the Panel Library. The Inbox opens from Deska itself and from the split menu, and a single Thread opens when you pick it on the board or find it in the Command Palette. Cmd/CtrlShiftJ jumps to the next thread that wants something from you. See Agent threads.

• Document: preview PDFs, Word documents and images right on the canvas.
• Sticky Note: a freeform colored note with rich text. Notes can be anchored to a panel with a dashed connector line.
• Note Library: every note you have written, searchable, with the capture inbox at the top. Deska seeds one into every workspace for you, so it is always there whether or not you ever open the Note Library card in the picker.
• AI Scratchpad: a quick notepad for a brain-dump, with a live word count and a short recap line at the top.

Small, single-purpose widgets that keep their own space on the canvas and never share a tab stack with anything else. Most of them are chromeless: they render without a tab bar and reveal a close button on hover. A few (AI Scratchpad, Voice, Brainrot Player) keep the normal panel header.

• Todo: a compact checklist with a progress counter.
• Pomodoro: a 25/5 focus timer whose countdown keeps running across workspace switches.
• Music: a mini lofi player to keep you in the zone.
• Action Card: a small card that runs an ordered list of shell commands, so a routine like format, then commit, then push is one click. Its Library card is named Action Button and is still marked coming soon.
• Mood Ring and Brainrot Player: ambient extras for when you want a little background motion.

• Voice: a dictation catalog that transcribes what you say. This is a managed AI feature.
• Custom Embed: paste any URL to pin it as a panel with no address bar and no navigation chrome.
• Named media integrations: YouTube (a video or playlist URL), Twitch (a channel name, with chat beside the stream) and SoundCloud (a track or playlist URL) each take a short config form and open edge-to-edge. Spotify and TikTok appear in the Media category marked coming soon.
• Canvas: a nested canvas inside a dock zone, for splitting a complex layout into sub-surfaces.

Two surfaces hold panel-shaped things without putting them on the canvas:

• The ambient dock: a keychain of mini-panels in the bottom-left corner, always present. At rest it collapses into a fanned stack; hover and it unfolds into a note chip, a pomodoro disc and a music disc. Whatever is actually active fronts the collapsed stack, so a running timer beats a paused track beats the notepad. The chips are fixed to the screen, so they survive every zoom, pan and workspace switch.
• The notebook (Cmd/CtrlJ): a floating companion on the right of the window whose pages are panels. Pages arrive transient for a glance, get dog-eared to stay one click away in the spine, or get anchored to keep the notebook open for good. See Notes & the notebook.