Collaborator

Collaborator is a place to build with agents.

Collaborator is an end-to-end environment for agentic development. Terminals, context files, and running code — all arranged on an infinite canvas in one place. No context switching, no tab hunting. Just your agents and your work, side by side.

The app is early-stage and in active development, with native desktop targets for macOS, Windows, and Linux. On Windows, terminal sessions can target both PowerShell and WSL2 distros.

Install

Download the latest release for macOS, Windows, or Linux.

macOS and Linux also support command-line install:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/collaborator-ai/collab-public/main/install.sh | bash

Windows: use the .exe installer from the releases page.

Stack

Collaborator is a native desktop app built with:

• Electron 40 — desktop shell with multi-webview architecture

• React 19 — UI framework

• Tailwind CSS 4 — styling

• electron-vite — build tooling with hot reload

• xterm.js — terminal emulation backed by a persistent node-pty sidecar

• Monaco Editor — code editing with syntax highlighting

• BlockNote / TipTap — rich text markdown editing

• D3 — force-directed graph visualization

• sharp — image processing

• KaTeX — math rendering in markdown

All data is stored locally on disk.

Quickstart

1. Open Collaborator

2. Add a workspace — click the workspace dropdown in the navigator and choose "Add workspace", or press Cmd+Shift+O, then select a local folder

3. Double-click the canvas to create a terminal, and start an agent

4. Drag files from the navigator onto the canvas to open them as tiles alongside your running agents

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Specification

Application overview

Collaborator is a single-window application for macOS, Windows, and Linux. It operates primarily on local files with no accounts required. Anonymous, non-identifying usage analytics are collected via PostHog.

The window is divided into two regions:

• Navigator — a resizable sidebar on the left containing a file tree and workspace switcher

• Main area — the canvas, an infinite pan-and-zoom surface where tiles are arranged; also hosts the viewer, which displays the content of the file selected in the navigator

All application state is stored as JSON files in ~/.collaborator/.

Multiworkspace navigation

The navigator sidebar displays a file tree rooted at the active workspace folder. Users can maintain multiple workspaces and switch between them.

Workspace management

A dropdown at the top of the navigator shows the active workspace name. It provides:

• A list of all workspaces for quick switching

• "Add workspace" to open a new local folder (also available via Cmd+Shift+O)

• "Remove workspace" to remove a workspace from the list (does not delete files)

Each workspace gets its own independent file tree. The canvas and viewer are shared across workspaces.

File tree

The file tree shows all files and folders in the active workspace. It supports:

• Expand/collapse folders by clicking

• Two view modes: hierarchical tree view, and a chronological feed view sorted by date

• Sorting: cycles through created (newest/oldest), modified (newest/oldest), and name (A-Z/Z-A)