Creating Or Opening A Workspace

A workspace is a directory that contains markdown and related files. Chan treats the workspace root as the filesystem boundary for editing, search, graph, and terminal work.

Desktop

On a fresh install, Chan Desktop creates a Chan workspace under your Documents folder and seeds it with this manual. From the workspaces window you can also open an existing folder, attach a running chan serve URL, or receive a remote workspace through the listener.

CLI

Start a local server for a folder:

chan serve ~/notes

The command prints a loopback URL with a bearer token. Open that URL in a browser on the same machine.

Workspace contents

Chan watches the workspace tree for external edits. The files are still yours: edit them with another program, commit them to git, or move the folder as a normal directory.

File transfers

File Browser inspectors expose Upload and Download for selected files and directories. Graph inspectors expose the same actions for file and directory nodes where the action applies.

• For a file, Upload replaces the selected file. Text-class paths reject

uploaded bytes that are not valid UTF-8.

• For a directory, Upload adds the selected files inside that directory.

Existing target paths are refused.

• Download retrieves the selected file as-is. Downloading a directory

retrieves a tar archive rooted at that directory name.