Workspace

What a workspace is

Workspace is the outermost organization unit in VizChat. A workspace contains:

• A FileTree holding PDFs, images, bookmarks, and canvas documents
• A set of canvases / documents, each an independent 2D workspace
• A shared AI context — agents can read sibling documents for cross-file reasoning within the same workspace

You can create multiple workspaces along "project / client / research topic / quarter" axes, and they stay isolated — files and conversations in one workspace do not appear in another's AI context.

Interface layout

After login the default view is a three-pane structure:

FileTree supports:

• Drag-drop file upload → auto-parsed by document_parser
• Add bookmark → paste a URL in the dialog → create a bookmark preview
• New folder → organize many files
• Rename, move, delete

WorkbenchTabBar

A row of tabs sits atop the center pane. Each open document is a tab, similar to VS Code or a browser. Clicking a document in the FileTree opens it as a tab. The openWorkbenchItems and activeWorkbenchItemKey fields are managed by the workspace-slice zustand store.

Tabs support:

• Right-click menu: close, close others, close all, reveal in file tree
• Automatic disambiguation — when same-named files from different folders are open at once, each tab appends a folder segment next to the filename: the shortest run that tells them apart (not necessarily the last one), with elided parts marked by …, as in …/inline/…. The full path stays in the tab's tooltip
• Persistent state on close — reopening the workspace restores the tab list

Renderers per document type

Renderers mount by preview kind: type only answers "how is it stored, and can it be edited", so binary images, audio, PDFs and archives — and text Markdown, SVG and HTML — each get their own viewer (src/lib/workbench/preview-kind.ts derives the kind from type and mimeType; src/lib/workbench/registry.ts lists one line per preview kind):

• storyboard / dashboard — canvases, host-embedded cross-origin canvas-iframes
• text — text editor; HTML / SVG also get an isolated preview
• binary — image viewer, audio / video player, PDF / Office preview; unrecognized formats show a file card
• bookmark — URL card

Typical multi-workspace layouts

Scenario 1: consulting firm, one workspace per client

📁 Workspace: Acme Corp
  📁 Quarterly reports
    📄 Q1-dashboard.dsb
    📄 Q2-storyboard.stb
  📄 competitor-analysis.pdf

📁 Workspace: Beta Inc
  📄 user-interview-notes.docx
  📄 retention-model.stb

The two clients' AI conversations never cross-contaminate — asking "our sales last quarter" only sees the active workspace.

Scenario 2: grad student, one workspace per course

📁 Workspace: Machine Learning
  📄 paper-notes/
  📄 homework canvases

📁 Workspace: Thesis
  📄 literature-review.stb
  📄 experiment-data/

Scenario 3: personal knowledge base

A single default workspace holds everything — works well for lightweight users who don't want to manage multiple spaces.

Workspace sharing (planned)

Today VizChat is primarily single-player. Workspace-level sharing and multiplayer collaboration are on the roadmap. Document-level sharing is designed but not yet shipped — see Sharing for the intended model and today's workarounds.

Next step

• Canvas mental model
• Agent workflow
• Workspace feature details