Labs: top bar and quick switcher layout

[sean-brydon]

Settings › Labs › Layout lets you try other ways to lay out the window. The sidebar stays the default and doesn't change. This branch adds the choice and a small registry for it, plus one direction: Top bar and quick switcher. Other branches add the other directions to the same registry.

The registry

app/src/components/layouts/registry.ts holds one entry per layout. An entry says:

• what replaces the sidebar (side, or null for nothing);
• what bar goes across the window's top (top);
• what replaces the status bar (bottom);
• what overlay it mounts (overlay).

App.tsx draws the layout from its entry. The prefs keep the layout's id (prefs.layout), and ?layout=<id> picks one in the mock. An id this Shipyard doesn't know shows the sidebar.

Top bar

There's no sidebar. The way around runs across the top, and the work gets the window's full width.

• Home.
• Projects ⌘E finds any worktree by its name or its task. What needs you comes first, from every project, and the next one is already picked. Then the project you're in, then the rest with their counts, and every box's state, offline ones too.
• Open worktrees as tabs, each with its state. ⌃1–⌃9 go to them. Closing a tab leaves its agents running.
• "2 need you" goes straight to the agent that has waited longest.
• "2 working · 4 done", or a held ⌃⇥ anywhere, opens a switcher. It works like macOS ⌘-Tab: every agent as a card with the last lines of its screen, grouped by what it needs, starting on the worktree you were in before.
• Review, the other places, search, notifications and Settings.

The tab strip underneath is unchanged and picks the agent. The status bar leaves out what the bar already says.

Directions explored

Grouped by the question each answers first:

• Triage
  • Inbox first (Superhuman, GitHub notifications). Built on its own branch.
  • Board or mission control (Linear's board, kanban). Rejected by the user ("Nobody uses board"). Its grouping by state lives on in the switcher.
• Switching
  • Top bar and quick switcher (Vercel and Linear switchers, browser tabs, ⌘-Tab). This PR.
  • Command first (Raycast, Zed's quick open). Built on its own branch.
  • Icon rail and breadcrumb (VS Code's activity bar, Arc). Built on its own branch.
• Overview
  • Exposé of live agents (Mission Control). Folded into this PR's ⌃⇥ switcher, which works as an overlay in any layout.
  • Spatial canvas (tldraw, Figma). Not built: it needs a mouse, it's costly to keep live, and like the board it makes you arrange agents yourself.
• Focus
  • Split-pane workspace (tmux, Zellij, Warp). Built on its own branch.
  • Remade sidebar (agents first, the tree demoted). Built on its own branch.

Scores

Each round, a fresh critic subagent scored the screenshots: 1440×900 and 1100×750, dark and light, 32 in all. I fixed what each round found before the next.

	What needs you	Switching	Overview	Focus and calm	Learnability	Visual quality	Overall
Top bar, round 1	8	7	5	7	6	5	6
Top bar, round 2	8.5	8	8	8	6.5	7	7.5
Top bar, round 3	9	8	7	8	6	7	7.5
Top bar, round 4	9	9	7	9	6	8	8
Top bar, round 5 (final)	9	8	7	9	6.5	7.5	8
Baseline sidebar (median of the 5 critics)	6	6	7	6	8	7	6.5

My own baseline score is 7. Screenshots undersell how familiar the sidebar is, and that its tree keeps every worktree's state on screen.

Recommendation

• Ship Top bar as a Labs option, not the default yet. It's fastest to what needs you and calmest. But its learnability (6.5) is where the sidebar clearly wins (8): ⌃⇥ and ⌘E have to be discovered.
• Hybrid now. Keep the sidebar as the default and give it the top bar's best ideas, none of which depends on the layout:
  • the "N need you" pill;
  • the ⌃⇥ switcher;
  • the ⌘E finder that leads with Needs you.
• To make it the default: teach ⌃⇥ once, and let the switcher pin open as a page for an overview that stays on screen. Then test it again.

Checks

• pnpm typecheck:plugins, check:titles, check:csp, check:themes, test and build pass.
• tsc -p e2e passes.
• The new spec, e2e/layout-topbar.spec.ts (8 tests), passed 3 times over with --repeat-each=3. It covers opening a worktree, starting a task, reaching Settings, ⌃⇥, ⌘E and closing a tab.
• Axe has three new scenes for the top bar, all clean.
• cargo check and the docs build pass.
• go vet passes, and go test -race passes. internal/wire failed once and passed on a rerun. internal/box needed -timeout 25m on a busy machine. Neither has Go changes on this branch.
• In the full axe run, settings-boxes fails with a list violation. This branch doesn't touch that screen.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[vercel]

The latest updates on your projects. Learn more about Vercel for GitHub.

Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated
berth	Ready	Preview	Oct 9, 2026 9:06pm UTC
berth-docs	Ready	Preview	Oct 9, 2026 9:06pm UTC

[sean-brydon]

Stashed: not going ahead with this layout for now. The branch stays for later.