Orchestra Canvas
The Orchestra Canvas is a grid of live chat tiles. Each tile is a full chat session with its own conversation, its own agent, and its own model. You can run up to nine at once, drag them into any arrangement, and watch them all work in parallel.
This is the surface Ptah opens on in the desktop app.
Why a grid
Section titled “Why a grid”One conversation is a bottleneck. A long refactor blocks the quick question you wanted to ask, and a background research task blocks both.
The canvas removes that queue. Give each concern its own tile:
- One tile drives the feature you are building.
- One tile runs a review pass over the diff.
- One tile researches the library you are about to adopt.
- One tile watches the test suite.
Each tile keeps its own context window. Work in one never pollutes another.
Layout modes
Section titled “Layout modes”The chat area has two layout modes.
| Mode | What you see |
|---|---|
| Single | One conversation, full width. |
| Grid | The canvas — up to nine tiles. |
The desktop app starts in grid mode. Switch modes from the layout control in the chat header.
Adding a tile
Section titled “Adding a tile”Click Add new session tile in the canvas toolbar. You can give the session a name, or leave the field empty and let Ptah name it.
You can also promote an existing session onto the canvas. A session already open as a tab becomes a tile without losing its history.
If you add a session that is already on the canvas, Ptah focuses the existing tile instead of creating a duplicate.
Arranging tiles
Section titled “Arranging tiles”Drag a tile by its header to move it. Drag an edge or a corner to resize it. The grid reflows around what you move.
The layout is responsive. Ptah recomputes the grid at two breakpoints, so a narrow window stacks tiles rather than shrinking them past legibility.
Locking the layout
Section titled “Locking the layout”Click the lock control in the toolbar to freeze every tile in place. Locked tiles cannot be dragged or resized. Use this once you have an arrangement you like and you want to stop moving it by accident while you work.
One tile is the focused tile at any moment. Keyboard input and the model selector apply to it. Click a tile to focus it.
The focused tile stays in sync with the tab bar. Focusing a tile on the canvas selects the same session in the tab list, and the reverse is also true.
Per-tile agent status
Section titled “Per-tile agent status”Each tile carries an agent indicator in its header. It shows which agent is active in that tile and whether the tile is currently streaming a response.
Click the indicator to open a mini panel with that tile’s agent detail, without leaving the canvas or losing your place in the other eight.
Closing a tile
Section titled “Closing a tile”Close a tile from its header. Closing a tile removes it from the grid. The session itself survives — it stays in your session history and you can bring it back onto the canvas later.
Per-workspace layouts
Section titled “Per-workspace layouts”Canvas layouts are scoped to the workspace. Switching workspaces gives you that workspace’s own arrangement of tiles, not a shared one.
Opening it in VS Code
Section titled “Opening it in VS Code”The canvas is not Electron-only. In the VS Code extension, run Ptah: Open Orchestra Canvas from the Command Palette. See the VS Code extension page.
Next steps
Section titled “Next steps”- Send your first message in a tile
- Switch models per tile
- Spawn CLI agents for work that does not need a tile
- Run a Tribunal when you want several vendors on one problem