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Mission control for your coding agents: an infinite canvas for terminals, editors, browsers, and docs.

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Cate is a desktop IDE built on an infinite canvas, made for running many terminals and coding agents at once. Run Claude Code, Codex, or any agent CLI in a Cate terminal and the canvas becomes mission control: every terminal shows whether its agent is working, finished, or waiting on you, and Cate sends a notification the moment one needs input. Spin up parallel git worktrees with one click and each gets its own colored territory on the canvas, so five agents on five branches stay five visibly separate workstreams instead of a pile of tabs.

Around that core is a full IDE: Monaco editors, embedded browsers, document viewers, git tooling, and an in-app agent chat. Float panels anywhere on the canvas, dock them into tabs and splits, or detach them into their own OS windows. Cate restores the whole layout when you reopen the folder.

Getting started: open a folder and it becomes a workspace. Right-click to add panels, press Cmd+K for the command palette, drag panels onto the dock to build tabs and splits. No config files.

Install

Download a prebuilt release. Don't build from source for daily use.

Platform	Formats	Link
macOS	DMG, ZIP (arm64, x64)	Latest release
Windows	NSIS installer, ZIP (x64)	Latest release
Linux	AppImage, DEB, tar.gz (x64)	Latest release

What's inside

• Agent-aware terminals: Cate detects coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, and others) running in any terminal. Tabs show live agent state: running, finished, or waiting for input, with an OS notification when an agent needs you. Terminals survive restarts and window moves with scrollback, colors, and full-screen TUIs intact.
• Parallel work: describe what you're working on and Cate creates a git worktree with its own branch, color, and territory on the canvas. Check out a PR straight into a worktree, and symlink .env or node_modules into every new one automatically.
• Agent-drivable browser: built-in browser panels that agents can control from the shell via the cate CLI: open pages, take screenshots, read accessibility snapshots, click and type.
• In-app agent chat: an embedded coding agent (Pi) with chat threads and per-chat model memory. Connect Anthropic, OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot, Gemini, OpenRouter, Groq, Mistral, DeepSeek, and more via OAuth or API key.
• Canvas & layout: infinite zoom and pan, docking into tabs and splits across four zones, detachable windows, saved layouts, and multi-project session restore.
• Editors & docs: Monaco editors with syntax highlighting, multi-cursor, diffs, and Markdown preview; document panels for PDFs, DOCX, and images.
• Git: git-aware file tree with live watching, plus a source-control sidebar for staging, branches, worktrees, history, and inline diffs. Full-text search.
• Remote workspaces: connect to a machine over SSH and work on it like a local folder. Terminals, agents, and search run remotely through a lightweight runtime daemon.
• Navigation: canvas-wide search across files, terminal scrollback, and panel titles; command palette; panel-to-panel keyboard navigation.

Extensions

Cate has an extension system for third-party panels (MCP servers, diagrams, and more), each served in its own isolated webview. Browse and build them in the companion repo: 0-AI-UG/cate-extensions.

Keyboard shortcuts

macOS shown below; on Windows/Linux use Ctrl in place of Cmd.

Panels & files		View & navigation
New terminal	Cmd+T	Command palette	Cmd+K
New editor	Cmd+Shift+E	Search everything	Cmd+Shift+F
New browser	Cmd+Shift+B	Toggle sidebar	Cmd+B
New agent	Cmd+Shift+A	Toggle file explorer	Cmd+Shift+X
New canvas	Cmd+Shift+C	Toggle minimap	Cmd+Shift+M
New file	Cmd+N	Focus next / previous panel	Ctrl+Tab / Ctrl+Shift+Tab
Save file	Cmd+S	Move between panels	Cmd+←↑↓→
Close panel	Cmd+W	Delete focused panel	Cmd+Backspace

Canvas
Zoom in / out	Cmd+= / Cmd+-
Reset zoom	Cmd+0
Zoom to fit / selection	Cmd+1 / Cmd+2
Auto-layout canvas	Cmd+Shift+L
Pan canvas	Shift+←↑↓→
Toggle select / hand tool	Shift+Space
Undo / redo	Cmd+Z / Cmd+Shift+Z

Every shortcut is rebindable in Settings.

Build from source

For contributors. Use the release above otherwise.

Prerequisites:

• Bun: package manager and script runner.
• Node.js 20 or 22 LTS (see .nvmrc) on your PATH. The build scripts run under it; the runtime daemon bundles its own Node 22.
• Linux only: node-pty ships prebuilt binaries for macOS and Windows, but not Linux, so it compiles from source there. Install Python 3 and a C++ toolchain:
  • Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install build-essential python3
  • Fedora/RHEL: sudo dnf install @development-tools gcc-c++ make python3
  • Arch: sudo pacman -S base-devel python

Fresh clone, one command sets everything up (installs dependencies and builds the local runtime daemon):

git clone https://github.com/0-AI-UG/cate.git
cd cate
bun run setup

Then:

bun run dev          # dev server with hot reload
bun run typecheck
bun run test         # unit tests (vitest)
bun run test:e2e     # Playwright integration tests
bun run build        # production build
bun run package      # package for distribution (:mac, :win, :linux)

Packaged binaries land in release/. The runtime daemon is rebuilt by bun run runtime:tarball (re-run it after changing anything under src/runtime/).

Architecture

src/
├── agent/      # Embedded Pi coding-agent: process manager, auth, marketplace, panel UI
├── cli/        # The `cate` CLI available inside Cate terminals (browser control, panels, editor)
├── main/       # Electron main process: IPC, workspaces, windows, updater, security
├── preload/    # Context-isolated IPC bridge
├── renderer/   # React 18 app: canvas, docking, panels, sidebar, stores, hooks
├── runtime/    # Runtime daemon for remote (SSH) workspaces: terminals, agents, search
└── shared/     # IPC channels and shared types

Cate runs all IPC through a context-isolated preload bridge. Filesystem access is scoped to registered workspace roots, browser panels disable node integration, and terminals can't spawn outside approved directories.

Stack: Electron 41, React 18, Zustand 5, Monaco 0.52, xterm.js 5.5 + node-pty 1.0, Tailwind 3.4, electron-vite, electron-builder, electron-updater, Sentry. PDFs and DOCX via pdf.js and mammoth, git via simple-git, file watching via @parcel/watcher and chokidar. The embedded coding agent is built on @earendil-works/pi, shipped as an on-demand runtime alongside the app.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md. Release-by-release history lives in the CHANGELOG.

Star history

License

MIT