Workspace Tour
Scholardo's main window has three panes. Understand what each one is for and everything else follows.
| Position | Name | Answers |
|---|---|---|
| Left | Sidebar | Where your material lives — four tabs organizing every file in the project |
| Middle | Content area | What you're looking at — tabs plus preview / editor windows |
| Right | Terminal pane | What the AI is doing — agent sessions and the terminal |
Left sidebar: four tabs
A row of icon tabs at the top, one per area of the project folder:
| Tab | Sub-sections | Holds |
|---|---|---|
| Sources | Docs / Refs / Feeds | What you take in: papers, reference entries, subscriptions |
| Notebook | Notes / Highlights / Todo | What you produce: notes, highlights, todos |
| Outputs | Writing / Figures / Tables / Exports | What you hand off: manuscripts, figures, tables, exports |
| Agent | Skills / Subagents / Workflows / Rules / Memory | How the AI behaves |
The Agent tab is hidden by default. Enable it under Settings → Agent. It's for people who want to customize AI behavior deeply; day-to-day use doesn't need it.
To the left of the tab icons is a collapse button that hides the whole sidebar (Cmd+B). With the sidebar collapsed, moving the pointer to the window's left edge floats it back temporarily.
The sidebar is the folder
The four tabs aren't virtual categories — they map onto real directories in the project folder. Drop a PDF into sources/docs/ from Finder and Sources → Docs shows it immediately. Conversely, the grouping and renaming you do in the sidebar are real file operations.
Middle: content tabs
Click any file in the sidebar and it opens as a tab in the middle. The tab strip scrolls horizontally; each tab carries a file-type icon.
Scholardo picks the right window for the file type — an annotatable reader for PDFs, native rendering for Word and PowerPoint, a grid editor for spreadsheets, a live-preview editor for Markdown. The full routing table is in Preview Windows.
Tabs are remembered when you quit and restored on next launch (tabs whose file no longer exists are pruned automatically).
Right: where the AI works
The right pane is what most sets Scholardo apart from other reference managers: a real terminal running a real AI CLI (Claude Code, Codex, pi, …) — not a chat box wrapped around an API.
- The top row holds session tabs;
Cmd+Tstarts a new one - The bottom is the message composer, with voice input
- The magnifier opens conversation history search
Because the agent runs inside your project directory and connects to Scholardo over MCP, it can read your papers, write your notes, and query your highlights directly. See Agent & MCP Tools.
Both side panes resize
Draggable dividers sit on either side of the content area. Widths are remembered per project.
Menu bar todos
Beyond the main window, Scholardo lives in the macOS menu bar. Clicking the icon opens a lightweight todo panel — jot down a task, check one off, or have the AI draft one, without switching back to the main window. See Todo.
Where to next
Pick by what you want to do right now:
- Import and read papers → Docs — Papers & Documents
- Manage references and citations → Refs — References
- Track new work in your field → Feeds — Subscriptions
- Take notes → Notes
- Write a paper → Writing