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Kepler is one window with three parts: a sidebar on the left, the chat in the middle, and panels you open beside it. The panels are shared. What you see in the Terminal, Browser and Editor is what Kepler sees, and Kepler can act in them too. Shortcuts on this page are written for macOS. On Windows and Linux, use Ctrl where you see Cmd.
The Kepler window: the sidebar on the left with workspaces and their sessions, the chat in the middle showing the Evidence and safe remediation of a checkout investigation, and the Terminal panel open on the right on the Agent tab, showing the deployment YAML Kepler read.

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The sidebar

Toggle the sidebar with Cmd+\. From top to bottom it holds: Right-click a session to pin, rename, export or delete it, or to open it with Open in new tab. Double-click its title to rename it in place. Cmd-click the session, or double-click its row beside the title, to open it in a tab of its own. See Tabs and split panes.

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The chat

The chat is where you talk to Kepler. Type anywhere in the window and the text goes to the composer. Enter sends, Shift+Enter adds a line. Type / for commands and @ to attach context. While Kepler works you see its thinking, a card for each tool it runs, and the exact command it ran. Type while a run is in progress and the message is queued and sent as its own turn when the run ends. Press Esc to stop a run. When Kepler searches the web, its sources show as small chips with each site’s icon and name, right where they are cited. Several sources at one spot stack into one chip. Hover or click it to list them all. Links open in your own browser, and Copy on a reply gives you the source links rather than citation codes. A few things dock above the composer when they need you:
  • Posture chip: the autonomy dial. Click it or press Shift+Tab to cycle Observe, Assist and Yolo. See Postures.
  • Model picker: which model this conversation uses. Open it from the composer or with /model. Kepler never switches models on its own.
  • Approval dock: the command Kepler wants to run, with Run, Reject, and two ways to stop being asked again: This session for this conversation, Always for every conversation from now on. Cmd+Enter runs, Cmd+Shift+Enter allows for the session, Esc rejects.
  • Clarification card: when Kepler hits a real fork it asks instead of guessing.
  • Todo tracker: the steps of a longer task, ticked off as Kepler goes.
  • Machine control: beside Send, once Remote access is on. It names the machine this thread’s commands and files run on, This Mac until you pick another. See Remote access.
The small indicator at the top right of the conversation opens This thread: the task list for the current job, background work that is Running, the watchers armed here under Watching, the documents and files this conversation produced or changed, and under Can reach, the folders and machines Kepler can use here.

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Operator shell mode

Type ! at the start of an empty composer and it turns into a shell prompt. The command you type runs in your terminal, and Kepler reads the output on your next message. This works in every posture, Observe included, because you are the one running the command. The always-blocked list still applies. Press Esc to leave shell mode.
End the line with & to keep a command running in the background, such as a port-forward or a log tail. It is listed under Running in This thread with a Stop button, and it ends on its own after an hour.

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Tabs and split panes

Keep several conversations open at once. Ask something new in one while a long run streams in another.
The Kepler window with three tabs in the title bar. The active tab is split into two panes: on the left, a finished investigation into why checkout is not ready, with its finding, evidence, timeline and fix; on the right, a fresh conversation with a question typed in its composer.

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Tabs

Press Cmd+T, or choose File > New Tab, and the title bar becomes a tab strip. Until you open a second tab nothing changes: one conversation, titled as usual.
  • Open a session from the sidebar in its own tab: Cmd-click it, double-click its row beside the title, or right-click it and choose Open in new tab.
  • Click a tab in the strip to bring it to the front.
  • Cmd+1 to Cmd+9 pick a tab. Cmd+Shift+[ and Cmd+Shift+] step through them.
  • Cmd+W closes the focused pane, or the tab when it has only one. It never closes the window.
  • Closing the last tab leaves you with a fresh session, never an empty window.

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Split panes

Any tab splits into panes, side by side or stacked, as many times as the window has room for. Each pane is a conversation with its own composer.
  • Cmd+D splits the pane you are in to the right, and Cmd+Shift+D splits it below. The same two are under View > Split Right and View > Split Below in the menu bar.
  • To open a session from the sidebar beside the one you are in, right-click it and choose Open in split right or Open in split below.
  • A new pane starts as a fresh session. Under its composer it offers the other ways in: make it incognito, open a session into it from the sidebar or Cmd+K, or close it.
  • Drag a session from the sidebar, a tab, or a pane’s own grip onto another pane to place it there. Drop zones show where it will land.
  • Cmd+[ and Cmd+] step between panes. Cmd+Option with an arrow key moves to the pane in that direction.
  • Cmd+Option+Enter zooms the focused pane and tucks the others into the edges. Press it again to go back. Cmd+Option+= evens out the sizes.
The pane you are typing in is the focused one. The others keep streaming, slightly faded, and their notifications still reach you. Each pane needs room for its text to stay readable. When there is not enough, Kepler says Not enough room for another pane and does not split. Close a side panel, such as the Feed, Topology or the Terminal, or widen the window, then split again. A war room fills its tab and cannot be split. Tabs and splits come back after Kepler restarts. On Windows and Linux, use Ctrl for Cmd and Alt for Option. Press Cmd+/ for every shortcut, or see Commands and shortcuts.

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Panels

Each panel opens beside the chat with a shortcut. Press the shortcut again to close it. Feed and Topology open from the sidebar.

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Terminal

The Terminal is your shell, not an emulation. Open more shells with New shell in the tab strip. Copy with Cmd+C and paste with Cmd+V (Ctrl+Shift+C and Ctrl+Shift+V on Windows and Linux). Every command you run gets a dot in the gutter: hollow while it runs, green when it exits 0, red otherwise. Click a command in the scrollback (its dot, or right-click anywhere in its output) and pick Add to chat to send the command and its output into the conversation. That is the fastest way to hand Kepler something you already ran.

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Browser

The Browser panel has tabs and an address bar. Paste a dashboard URL into the chat, or ask Kepler to open one, and it navigates, reads the page, clicks and scrolls. A banner above the page says Kepler is browsing while it drives. Click Take control to use the page yourself, then Give back to Kepler when you are done. Log into a dashboard once in the panel and Kepler can read that dashboard from then on. A Grafana board or a cloud console you are signed into stays readable across sessions.

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Editor and file explorer

Cmd+E, or the Explorer button in the top bar, opens a file tree and an editor. The tree only shows folders in the current workspace. Pick a file to open it. Files too large to load whole open read-only. Ask Kepler to change a file and it shows the diff and asks before writing, in any posture that allows writes.

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Memory and Topology

The Memory panel (Cmd+M) shows what Kepler has learned, in three tabs: Graph, Pages and Artifacts. See Memory for how to edit what Kepler remembers. Topology, from the sidebar, is the map of clusters, hosts, accounts and databases Kepler found on your machine. What Kepler proposes to add to it waits for your answer. See Topology.

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The Feed

The Feed, from the sidebar, is where Kepler leaves what it finished while you were elsewhere: automation reports, briefs, designed pages and alerts. It has two tabs.
The Kepler Feed on the Waiting tab, with a count of one. An automation's approval card asks: Checkout is still not ready. Open an investigation? It says the run stops if nobody decides in 3 hours 58 minutes, has a field for an optional note, and offers Deny and Approve, with Start session and Dismiss below.
Waiting is the one place to answer an automation’s approval. The bell, the notification, your phone and the automation’s own row all open it. Press Approve or Deny, with an optional note that is kept with the decision. The card says how long you have to decide. Start session opens a conversation about it first. On any post, Ask Kepler or Reply to Kepler starts a conversation about it, with the post’s report and run as context. Mark handled takes an alert out of Waiting and the bell. An alert also clears itself when a later run finds the problem gone. Not every report rings the bell. An automation can publish a routine report quietly, so it lands in the Feed and waits for you to read it. See Automations.

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Center stage

Double-click a panel’s header to move it to the middle of the window, where the chat usually sits. Use it when you want a full-width terminal or browser. Press Esc, or click Back to the side, to return the chat to the center.
The Terminal panel filling the center of the window on the operator's own shell tab. Four kubectl commands sit in the scrollback, each with a green dot in the gutter, applying the ConfigMap patch and restarting checkout. The chat with Kepler's remediation is moved to the right.

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Workspaces

A workspace is the set of folders Kepler is allowed to read and edit. Nothing outside it is visible to Kepler, not in the Editor, not through file tools, and not through a shell command that names a path outside it. That fence is the reason Kepler can be trusted with a terminal: it can only reach what you handed it. To add a folder:
1

Open a workspace

Press Cmd+O, or click Open workspace in the sidebar, and pick a folder. That folder becomes a workspace.
2

Grant more folders

Click the workspace in the sidebar to open its settings and use Add folder, or type /workspace add <dir> in the chat. /workspace remove <dir> takes one away.
3

Answer the fence prompt when it appears

If Kepler needs a path you have not granted, it stops and asks, in every posture. The card offers to grant the enclosing folder for the session.
Each workspace can carry its own kepler.md with conventions for that project. Run /init to draft one. If the folder has an AGENTS.md, Kepler reads that too. See Memory.

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Sessions and incognito sessions

A session is one conversation. It keeps its own posture, model, and history, and it belongs to a workspace. Start a new one with Cmd+N or /new. Come back to an older one and a short recap of where the work stands waits at the tail of the thread. Everything Kepler learns in a session, such as a service name, an incident, or a preference, goes into memory for later. An incognito session is the exception. Start one from the ghost button next to New session. It reads no memory, writes no memory, and nothing said in it is learned. Use it for a one-off question you do not want to shape future answers, or for anything you would rather Kepler forget. You can turn incognito off for a session from its right-click menu, but you cannot turn it on after the fact.

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Where to go next

Postures

Observe, Assist and Yolo, and what each one asks you about.

Commands and shortcuts

Every slash command and keyboard shortcut.

Memory

What Kepler remembers and how to edit it.

War room

Run an incident with a team of agents.