Workspaces

The workspace

Manifold opens straight into a full developer workspace — a panelled layout you can rearrange. The panel set includes a repositories sidebar, the agent terminal, search, a file tree, modified files, shell tabs, a web preview, and one or more editor panes.

Key workflows:

  • Open an existing local repository or clone one from GitHub.
  • Start an agent on a fresh worktree branch (named <repo>/<task-slug>, e.g. manifold/fix-login-bug).
  • Start an agent directly on the current branch when you don’t want a worktree.
  • Continue work from an existing branch or an open pull request.
  • Resume a stopped agent in place.
  • Generate commit messages and pull request descriptions with the same runtime the session used.
  • Detect merge conflicts and see how far ahead or behind the base branch you are.

Working across multiple repositories

A Workspace groups several repositories into one working set so a single agent can operate across all of them at once.

  • Create one from the New Workspace action in the sidebar and pick the repositories — and the runtime — to include.
  • The first repository is the agent’s working directory; the others are mounted through the runtime’s own multi-directory flag (--add-dir for Claude, Codex, and Copilot; --include-directories for Gemini).
  • When the agent starts, Manifold creates a worktree for every git repository in the set, all on the same branch (manifold/<workspace-name> by default), and removes them when the session ends.
  • Add or remove repositories from a workspace at any time from its sidebar section.

Workspaces are useful when a task spans several repositories at once — for example, landing a change that touches both a backend and a frontend repo, or running the same refactor across many services.