Core concepts

Most confusion with Synara disappears once one idea clicks: everything in Synara belongs to a task. This page explains the handful of concepts the rest of the docs build on, and points out the features people tend to miss in their first session.

The workspace at a glance

• Sidebar — your projects and their tasks, with live tasks surfaced first.
• Conversation — the transcript of the active task: agent turns, tool activity, plans, approvals, subagents.
• Composer — where you write objectives and pick the provider, model, and effort level.
• Terminal drawer — real terminals in the task's working directory, toggled with mod+j.
• Browser preview — a live preview beside the conversation for web work.
• Diff and Git views — review changes, commit, push, and manage pull requests without leaving the app.

Projects and tasks

A project is a local folder, ideally a Git repository. A task is one unit of work inside a project, and it owns everything about that work:

Because ownership is per-task, two tasks never share conversation context — and two tasks in separate worktrees never share files either.

Environments: local checkout or worktree

A task either works directly in your checkout or in a worktree — a separate working directory with its own branch that shares the repository's history.

Use the local checkout for one focused task. Use a worktree the moment a second task might touch the same repository, or when you want to review and discard an experiment without disturbing anything else.

Providers and sessions

Synara drives the agent runtimes installed on your machine — see the provider list. Each task owns one provider session at a time, but you are not locked in: a handoff lets another provider continue the same task, environment, and context. Useful for a second opinion or a provider-specific strength.

The review loop

Synara treats Git as the source of truth. The intended loop for every task:

1. The agent works; you steer and approve.
2. You read the resulting diff.
3. You commit what you want to keep, and only that.
4. You push and continue in the pull-request workspace if the repository is on GitHub.

Nothing ships because an agent said it was done — it ships because you reviewed the diff.

Features easy to miss

These are the things early users most often discover late:

• mod+j toggles the terminal drawer anywhere — run your own tests while the agent works; mod+d toggles the diff panel.
• /fork splits a thread into its own worktree in one step; /plan makes the agent propose before executing.
• mod+shift+b opens the browser preview beside the conversation.
• Split views (mod+\) keep two tasks visible side by side.
• /subagents in the composer asks a capable provider to delegate independent pieces of work to parallel child agents.
• The pull-request workspace reviews, comments on, and merges GitHub PRs across all your projects.
• AppSnap (macOS): press both Option keys to capture any app window and attach it to the current task.
• /export downloads a thread as a ZIP with a readable transcript; markers and pins keep long threads navigable.

The full list of shortcuts is in the keyboard reference, and All features maps everything else on one page.