Workspace Rail
Experimental
The workspace rail is experimental and off by default. Enable it in Settings → Files & Images → Workspace → Workspace rail. With the rail off, VMark behaves exactly as before — one workspace per window.
The workspace rail lets one window hold several workspaces at once, shown as a vertical strip of colored glyphs on the left edge. Clicking a workspace performs a full context switch: the editor tabs, the sidebar file tree, the split-pane layout, and the sidebar/outline state all swap to that workspace's own set — like switching Spaces in a browser, not just changing a filter.
What switches, what stays
| Surface | On a rail switch |
|---|---|
| Editor tab strip | Shows only the active workspace's tabs (plus browser pages) |
| Sidebar file tree | Re-roots to the active workspace, with its own folder-open and scroll state |
| Split panes | Each workspace remembers its own split layout |
| Outline | Per-tab collapse/filter/scroll state follows the workspace |
| Next/previous tab, tab context menu, Quick Open "open tabs" | Scoped to the active workspace |
| Reopen Closed Tab | Closed tabs are recorded per workspace (plus one shared browser scope) and reopened most-recent-first from File → Reopen Closed Tab, the command palette, or a shortcut you assign in Settings → Shortcuts (it ships unassigned: the nearby chords are taken). A reopened document is read again from disk, so it shows the file as it is now; if the file was moved or deleted, the tab is not restored and a notice says why. An untitled tab reopens empty. Unsaved edits are not recovered — closing a dirty tab already asked whether to save |
| Browser pages | Window-global — reachable from every workspace |
| Recent Files / Recent Workspaces menus | Global |
| Autosave, save prompts, file watching | Cover every tab, hidden or not |
Switching never closes anything: a hidden workspace's tabs stay open in the background, keep autosaving, and still get a save prompt if you close the window with unsaved changes.
Loose Files
Files opened from outside every workspace root live in a synthetic Loose Files entry (the stacked-files icon). Switching to it shows those tabs; it appears automatically when needed.
Moving files between workspaces
Ownership follows the file's path:
- Save As into another workspace's folder moves the tab there — and, if it is the tab you're looking at, the visible workspace follows it.
- Renames or moves on disk (including from Finder) re-home the tab the same way.
- Opening a file that belongs to a hidden workspace (via Quick Open, recents, or a file dialog) switches to that workspace first, so the tab you asked for is the tab you see.
Sessions and restart
Each workspace's config remembers only its own tabs and split layout. Human-opened browser pages persist per window. Hot exit restores every workspace of the window — including per-workspace sidebar state and the recorded closed-tab history — and reactivates the workspace you were in.
AI (MCP) behavior
AI clients opening documents through MCP never yank your visible workspace: workspace.open creates a background tab and returns its tabId for follow-up document calls. Only the explicit workspace.switch_tab action changes what you see, and its response reports workspaceSwitched: true so the AI can tell you it happened. See the MCP Tools Reference.
Rail actions
| Action | How |
|---|---|
| Switch workspace | Click its glyph |
| Add a workspace | File > Open Workspace (an already-railed folder switches to it instead of duplicating) |
| Reorder | Drag a glyph over another |
| Move to its own window | Drag a glyph out of the window |
| Duplicate to a new window | The ⧉ button on hover |
| Close a workspace | Right-click → Close. All its tabs close with it, pinned ones included; each tab with unsaved changes asks first, and cancelling keeps the workspace |
Terminal sessions
Each railed workspace owns its own terminal sessions. A rail switch swaps the visible terminal tabs; hidden workspaces' shells keep running untouched — no cd is typed into them, busy or idle — and switching back reveals the same shells with the session you were on remembered per workspace. New sessions (the + button, "Open Terminal Here", "Run in Terminal") are created in the active workspace and start in its root; closing a workspace or moving it to its own window closes its sessions with it. Details in the terminal guide.
Known limitation
On macOS, two spellings of the same folder that differ only in letter case (possible on case-insensitive volumes) are treated as different workspaces. This is deliberate: workspace identity is byte-exact on macOS and Linux, and case-folded on Windows.