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Threads Canvas

Threads is a spatial canvas, one per project, where chats, notes, terminals, and agent sessions live as connected nodes. Instead of stacking every conversation in a tab, you lay them out on a board and draw edges between them. The wiring is the context: anything connected to a chat node is addressable from that chat. Open the canvas from the threads toggle in the sidebar. Each project keeps its own canvas.

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Node kinds

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Edges feed context

An edge between two nodes is a context wire. When file, image, media, or text nodes are wired into a chat node, their content becomes addressable from that chat — the model pulls it in through read_canvas_node instead of you pasting it by hand. While a node is generating, its edges animate, so you can see at a glance what is feeding what.

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Layout

Two ways to arrange the graph:

• Tidy — one click runs a cytoscape-fcose force-directed pass in a worker, off the UI thread.
• Manual drag — place any node wherever you like; the canvas never snaps back.

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Context menu

Right-click the canvas or a selection to:

• Convert selection to chat — fold the highlighted nodes into a chat node that treats them as context
• Add nodes — drop new chat, text, agent, terminal, or wired-in nodes at the pointer

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Persistence

The whole graph is stored in the Tempest SQLite database across four tables: threads (one per project canvas), thread_nodes, thread_edges, and thread_messages. Quit and reopen — the canvas comes back exactly as you left it.

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Message Queue and sessions

Canvas-placed agent and terminal sessions are ordinary Tempest sessions — they simply carry the placement "canvas". The Message Queue treats them identically: enqueued prompts drain in order whether the session lives on the canvas or the tab bar.

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Canvas vs tab bar

A common rhythm: keep long agent runs in tabs, and use the canvas for planning — a chat node, a couple of notes, and wired-in files that keep the context connected.