#Getting started

#Open a folder

Fold starts on the welcome page — the one place a folder is picked, added or cloned. Choose a project folder (⌘O) or clone a repository (⌘⇧C). The folder becomes a workspace: one project, one repo, one folder.

A workspace opens with one terminal session already running in its root.

#The window

Everything lives in one see-through window. The stage is a grid of panes; the tools stand in lanes around it.

Part	What it is
The band	The title bar. Traffic lights, then the workspace segment (the open project, in its tint), then one chip per session, then the session-scope toggle. Everything window-wide lives here, and a drag on any of its ground moves the window.
The stage	Everything under the band, down to the foot lane. One split grid of panes: terminals, and the files, diffs and notes you open beside them. Every pane drags by its header, and every gutter between them drags.
The dock	The glass capsule at the bottom-right: Files, Git and Notes, then a tile per open document, then your account mark, the gear, the shortcuts key and Fold's own mark. A tool opens as a tool pane standing in a lane on any side of the stage, and stays until you close it.
The instruments	The capsule at the bottom-left: git's facts for the focused workspace — the branch, the worktree, the changes, the sync state, and the shelf while it has rows. Each fact opens its menu above itself.

#The first minute

• ⌘T spawns another session in the workspace root. ⌘1–9 switches between them; ⌥⇥ walks back through the most recent ones.
• Run your agent in a session. The chip wears the session's live terminal title, so an agent that says what it is doing is read from the band. Claude Code gets its own mark on the chip — moving while it works, still while it waits — and a done sound tells you when an agent finishes, wherever you are.
• ⌘P searches file names, file contents, your notes and every command. ⌘/ shows every shortcut.
• ⌘⇧G opens the Git tool pane. A change's diff, a commit or a pull request opens as a document pane in the grid.
• ⌘⇧↩ zooms the focused pane to the whole stage and puts the grid back. ⌘E tucks every open document away and brings them back.
• The window is see-through, and ⌃⌘F takes it into macOS full screen — the Dock away, the window opaque, the traffic lights on the reveal strip. The same key brings it back.

#Coming back

Every shell runs in a small helper that outlives Fold, so quitting kills nothing. On the next launch the layout comes back — every workspace that was open, its sessions, names, splits and working directories — and Fold reattaches to every shell still running, scrollback and all. A shell whose process is gone comes back as a fresh shell, said so. Fold never pretends a dead process is alive, and never types anything into a restored shell.

Closing a session asks: Shelve keeps it running out of sight, listed on the shelf in the instruments; Kill ends it. See Sessions.