snowpea desktop — user guide

Agent (agent.snowpea.ai) · Registry (registry.snowpea.ai)

snowpea desktop is a desktop window onto a running snowpea core. The core does all the work: it owns your sessions, your memory, your scheduled jobs and your credentials. The IDE is one of three clients that talk to it, alongside the snowpea terminal UI and the headless CLI.

That matters more than it sounds. Every client that shares a SNOWPEA_HOME shares one daemon, and therefore one set of sessions. A thread you start here is visible in the TUI, and a session you started this morning in a terminal is in the sidebar when you open the app.

The screens

Screen	Route	What it is for
Threads	/	Chat with the agent: streaming answers, approvals, slash commands
Diff review	/thread/:id/diff	Approve or reject what the agent changed, file by file
Agents	/agents	Agent definitions, running subagents, named agents and their channels
Worktrees	/worktrees	Parallel team runs: the task board and the worktrees behind it
Terminal	/terminal	A real shell per project, inside the app
Files	/files	Read-only file tree and viewer for the project
Skills	/skills	Search and install skills from the marketplaces
Schedule	/schedule	Recurring and one-shot jobs, and their live event feed
Gateway	/gateway	Chat-platform bindings and the unattended approval queue
Memory	/memory	Write and search the agent's long-term memory
Settings	/settings	Providers, project defaults, the shell allowlist, appearance
Setup wizard	/setup	First-run configuration; reachable any time from Settings

A few more pages cover things that are not a screen of their own: Attachments and Voice, which live inside the thread screen; Projects, the sidebar that chooses a thread's working directory; Viewers, the file viewer shared by Files, diff review and chat; Signing in to a provider and Updating, which happen from Settings; Themes for the look of the app; and Packaging for building and shipping it.

The chrome

Three things are always on screen.

• The rail on the left lists the screens above. Ctrl/⌘ 1 … 9 jump to the nth entry, and Ctrl/⌘ B collapses the rail to icons.
• The status bar at the bottom reports the core: connected, the protocol version both sides agreed on, the active theme, and the token count across every open thread. An lsp 2 segment appears when language servers are running, and stays on screen in the warning colour when one is broken — Settings → Tools has the detail. When it does not say connected, nothing else on this page will work, and the Settings page explains why.
• The command palette opens with Ctrl/⌘ K anywhere, or by typing / in an empty composer. It runs the core's slash commands, so what it offers depends on which skills are installed.

Keyboard

Press ? for the full list, which is generated from the same table the app uses, so it cannot drift.

Keys	Action
Ctrl/⌘ K	Open the command palette
?	Show the shortcut list
Esc	Close the overlay or dialog on top
Ctrl/⌘ B	Collapse or expand the sidebar
Ctrl/⌘ ,	Open Settings
Ctrl/⌘ 1 … 9	Jump to the nth screen
Ctrl/⌘ Enter	Send the prompt
Ctrl/⌘ V	Paste — attaches a clipboard image, otherwise pastes text
Ctrl/⌘ .	Interrupt the running turn
a / r	Approve / reject the focused file in a diff review

If the app cannot find a core

On a machine with no core installed, the app does not fail with a spawn error: it shows a screen with the install command for your platform, a Retry button and a Choose binary… picker. Install the core, press Retry, and the app continues where it left off. See Packaging for where the core comes from in a packaged build.