Activity panels

Every section of the activity bar renders a panel into the same column, and every one of those panels wears the same three rows of chrome: a caps title with a count, a right-aligned chip cluster ending in the refresh chip, and a / filter row. Learn the shape once and it transfers — the keys, the placeholders, the empty-state copy and the glyphs are identical whether you’re looking at GIT, TODOS or SESSIONS.

That consistency is enforced in code rather than by convention. A set of small shared modules under src/ui/ own the magnifier glyph, the refresh glyph, the two filter placeholders, the caps-label and subtitle styles, the filter-chip background, the empty-state layout, and the + New … action-button role. Before they existed, ~14 filter rows had drifted to two different magnifier codepoints and six refresh chips to four different glyphs. A design change now lands in every panel at once.

This page covers the shared shape first, then what’s specific to each panel. For the icon strip that switches between sections, see Activity bar.

The shared shape

GIT                                        ⟳     ← caps header + right-aligned refresh chip
 󰍉 / filter                                       ← filter row (inactive)
                                                  ← body

With a filter active, the header grows a dim count and the chip inverts:

TODOS  (3 of 47)                           ⟳
 󰍉 database▏

Four panels carry a second chip left of the refresh one — a sort: <mode> chip on TODOS / NOTES / FINDINGS / SESSIONS — and two more carry a view: <mode> chip (AGENTS, CLOUD AGENTS). They’re the same affordance: left-click cycles, right-click lists every mode with a ✓ on the current one.

FINDINGS  (12)      sort: Newest first     ⟳

The header row

• Caps label — GIT / TODOS / NOTES / FINDINGS / SESSIONS / HTTP / AGENTS / CLOUD AGENTS / INTEGRATIONS. Bold, in the theme’s comment color, painted straight on the panel background (not on a chip).
• Count subtitle — dim, in parentheses, immediately after the label. Panels with a single flat list always show it: (N) unfiltered, (M of N) when a filter narrows it. Multi-section panels (GIT, INTEGRATIONS) deliberately show no top-level count — each of their sub-sections carries its own, and one number spanning LOCAL / REMOTE / WORKTREES / PRS / STASHES / TAGS wouldn’t obviously mean anything.
• Mode chip — an optional key: value chip in dark-on-cyan, sitting one cell left of the refresh chip. sort: on TODOS / NOTES / FINDINGS / SESSIONS, view: on AGENTS / CLOUD AGENTS. It’s padded to the widest value it can hold so it can’t resize — and therefore can’t slide out from under a repeat-clicking pointer — as the mode changes.
• Refresh chip — a 3-cell icon-only chip (⟳, codicon-refresh U+EB37, ASCII fallback ↺) pinned to the far right of the header row, cyan on the panel background. Same glyph, same size, same corner in every panel and in the file-tree header.

Widths resolve right-to-left, and each piece is dropped rather than clipped when it won’t fit — glyph and click rect together, so a narrow panel never leaves an invisible hit target behind. A half-painted chip is a dead click target, which is worse than an absent one.

The drop order is deliberate. The count subtitle goes first: it’s informative, the refresh chip is functional, and folding the count into the refresh chip’s budget meant typing in the filter — which grows (N) into (N of M) — could delete the refresh chip mid-interaction. Then the mode chip degrades to an icon-only form (U+F0DC for sort, ASCII ~) before vanishing entirely; right-click still opens its full menu. The refresh chip keeps the last cells, because it’s the older affordance and users reach for it by position.

Two shared helpers back this. GIT and INTEGRATIONS use the label-plus-refresh form; TODOS, NOTES, FINDINGS and SESSIONS use the label-plus-chip-cluster form. AGENTS, CLOUD AGENTS and HTTP compose their own headers — the agents panels predate the shared chip and HTTP carries a collapse-all chip — but they use the same glyphs, the same styles and the same far-right placement.

What refresh does, per panel

Panel	Chip action	Palette equivalent
GIT	Re-discover repos — git status, branches, tags, worktrees	git.refresh_repos
TODOS	Re-scan the workspace for markers	todos.refresh
NOTES	Re-scan .mnml/notes/	notes.refresh
FINDINGS	Re-scan .mnml/findings/	findings.refresh
SESSIONS	Drop the render caches + the listening-port cache	sessions.refresh
HTTP	Re-scan all seven sections’ caches	http.refresh
AGENTS	Force the next poll instead of waiting for the interval	agents.refresh

Each fires a short toast (todos: rescanned, git: refreshed, …) so a chip click that finds nothing new still reads as having done something.

Right-click the chip for the panel’s settings menu: Refresh now, Auto-refresh: on / off (persisted per panel, on by default), and — on TODOS / NOTES / FINDINGS — the four sort rows, duplicated from the sort: chip so the answer is where you already right-click. See Activity lists.

The filter row

Row 1 of every panel is a filter input rendered as a full-width pill:

State	Renders
Empty, unfocused	󰍉 / filter in the comment color
Empty, focused	󰍉 type to filter… with a cyan ▏ cursor
Non-empty	the text you typed, in the foreground color

The magnifier is nf-md-magnify (U+F0349), ASCII fallback /. The placeholder pair is noun-form when idle and verb-form when it’s waiting on you. Panels that need a scope hint extend it — CLOUD AGENTS reads type to filter (ticket / runId / state)….

Matching is always case-insensitive substring; what it matches against is per-panel (see below).

Keys when the panel is focused

Key	Action
/	Focus the filter input
any printable char	Append to the filter
Backspace	Delete the previous character
Ctrl+W	Delete the previous word
Ctrl+U	Clear the whole filter
Ctrl+V	Paste from the clipboard
Enter	Unfocus, keeping the filter applied
Esc	Clear and unfocus
j / ↓ (filter unfocused)	Move the row cursor down
k / ↑ (filter unfocused)	Move the row cursor up
Enter (filter unfocused)	Activate the cursored row

↑ / ↓ and Enter do double duty by intent — while the filter is focused they edit the input, while it’s unfocused they drive row navigation. The / grab is guarded against Ctrl and Alt, and stands down while a picker, prompt or the cmdline is open.

Click the filter row to focus it with the mouse; click elsewhere in the panel body to unfocus.

Empty states

Empty states come from one shared renderer: a message row, plus an optional dim hint row under it, both indented two cells. Panels distinguish “nothing here at all” from “your filter matched nothing”, so you always know whether the filter is what’s hiding rows:

  No findings yet.
  Stored under .mnml/findings/*.md

  No findings match /foo — 7 in workspace

On a narrow panel the message ellipsizes rather than being clipped mid-word, and below ~10 usable cells it’s dropped entirely — an ellipsis alone teaches nothing.

Action chips

Panels with a create action put it directly under the filter row rather than at the bottom of the list, so it stays one keystroke away when the list scrolls past the panel height. All of them use the same solid-fill “primary action” role: + New todo, + New note, + New finding, + New session. The fill is the focus signal — there’s no foreground swap on cursor, which at one point produced mid-grey text on mid-green.

Mode chips

A mode chip is a setting you can read without opening anything. Six panels wear one:

Panel	Chip	Modes	Persisted as
TODOS / NOTES / FINDINGS	sort:	Newest first · Oldest first · Name (A–Z) · Name (Z–A)	[ui] todos_sort / notes_sort / findings_sort
SESSIONS	sort:	State · Manual	[ui] sessions_sort
AGENTS	view:	status · workspace — what the rows group under	session-only
CLOUD AGENTS	view:	compact · standard — row density	session-only

The gesture is the same on all of them: left-click cycles, right-click opens a menu listing every mode with a ✓ on the current one. The two sort: axes survive a restart; the two view: modes are session-only. The chip carries its key rather than just its value, because a bare Newest first doesn’t say what it controls and two chips in one header have to be told apart.

Every chip also has a palette command, so the setting isn’t mouse-only: todos.sort / notes.sort / findings.sort cycle, and sessions.sort_auto / sessions.sort_manual set directly. Full depth on the sort chip — the four modes, the tiebreak rules, the narrow-panel fallback — is in Activity lists.

Row context menus

Rail rows that resolve to a file on disk carry a right-click menu: Open, Open in split, Reveal in tree, Reveal in Finder/Explorer, Copy path, and — where the row owns the file — Rename… and Delete…. NOTES, FINDINGS, SEARCH results and AGENTS rows all have one; TODOS rows carry their own AI-action menu instead, since a marker is a location inside a file rather than a file.

Two rules hold across all of them:

• Right-click moves the row cursor to the row you clicked, so the menu and the highlight always name the same file.
• Both reveal routes are always offered together. “Reveal in tree” navigates mnml’s own file tree; the OS reveal is a separate row. Nine menus once carried the in-app label while firing the OS reveal, so the in-app action didn’t exist at all.

See Activity lists for what each row does.

The TODOs panel

view.activity_todos — a workspace-wide scan for marker patterns in comments, one row per hit. The scan runs on first activation and populates a cache; the header’s ⟳ (or todos.refresh) re-runs it, and auto-refresh re-runs it on a two-second throttle. Full depth — the walker’s limits, the markdown rules, the row kebab and + New todo — is in Activity lists.

Marker patterns

Case-sensitive, matched on a word boundary so TODOLIST doesn’t false-trip:

Marker	Color
TODO	blue
FIXME	orange
XXX / HACK	red
REVIEW	purple

The “is this in a comment?” heuristic is intentionally rough — the marker counts if any of //, #, /*, --, or <!-- appears before it on the same line. So let title = "TODO"; in a Rust literal doesn’t count, but the // TODO: hook this up above it does.

Per-file constraints: files larger than 1 MB are skipped, and non-UTF-8 files (binaries) are skipped.

Playwright / Jest test-modifier scanner

.spec.ts / .test.ts / .spec.js / .test.js files get a second pass that picks up call-site test modifiers, even though they aren’t comment markers:

Call	Rendered tag	Meaning
test.fixme('title', …)	FIXME	Pending test — needs work
test.fail('title', …)	XXX	Expected-to-fail — flagged as a hazard
test.skip('title', …)	REVIEW	Disabled test — needs a decision

The title is the first quoted string on the same line. When there isn’t one, the tag reads .fixme(...) verbatim so the row is still findable. FIXME wins when two markers share a line. Non-test files stay on the comment-only path, so a .fixme( in production code is never a false positive.

FIXME  tests/survey.spec.ts:3   renders survey card
XXX    tests/editor.spec.ts:8   editor accepts nested lists
REVIEW tests/legacy.spec.ts:12  legacy filter

Rows and filtering

Row shape is TAG path:line title — tag bold in its color, path in the comment color, title in the foreground, truncated at 40 characters.

The filter matches against the tag, the workspace-relative path plus line number, or the title, so typing db narrows to every marker mentioning “db” in any of the three.

Enter (or a click) opens the file at the marker’s line, cursor at column 0.

The Notes panel

view.activity_notes — persistent workspace scratches under <workspace>/.mnml/notes/*.md, newest-modified first until you change the header’s sort: chip.

.mnml/ is auto-gitignored (it’s mnml-scoped state — see Security & hardening), so notes are local by default. Remove the line from .gitignore if you want to commit a specific one.

+ New note (chip, or notes.new) opens the New file prompt seeded with the next free auto-number — note-1.md, note-2.md, … Press Enter to accept the default, or type over it with a real name. The prompt exists because the chip used to create note-1.md silently with no chance to name it.

The filter matches the filename without its .md extension. Click or Enter opens the note. See Activity lists for the sort and auto-refresh behavior.

The Findings panel

view.activity_findings — a workspace-scoped archive of tester and review reports under <workspace>/.mnml/findings/*.md, newest-modified first until you change the header’s sort: chip.

It’s zero-config and cross-project: cd ~/Projects/mixr && mnml . picks up that repo’s .mnml/findings/ with no setup. Agents and testers write reports there; the panel is where you read them.

Rows are icon name age — the name is relative to the findings root with the .md stripped, so a nested round directory renders round-12/mouse-r16 rather than losing its context to the file stem, and the right-aligned age is a humanized mtime. Clicking a row opens the markdown in an editor pane.

The filter matches the same rendered relative name the row shows. + New finding (chip, or findings.new) seeds finding-1.md, finding-2.md, … into the New file prompt, mirroring + New note exactly — so the row under the filter is a chip slot here too, rather than the lone exception it once was.

Right-click a row for Open / Open in split / the two reveals / Copy path / Rename / Delete — the same menu NOTES rows carry. For the full depth on this panel — the recursive walk, the sort chip and the auto-refresh rules — see Activity lists.

The Sessions panel

view.activity_sessions — a cmux-style vertical strip of your AI sessions, not every process mnml has spawned.

That scoping was a user report: “why is bitbucket showing up in sessions? shouldn’t a session just be Claude Code or Codex?”. Sessions lists Pty panes whose profile label is Claude Code, Claude Code (resumed) or Codex. Bare shells, integration binaries (:term <binary>), and task launches are excluded — they still appear in their leaf’s tab strip as regular Pty tabs, they just don’t clutter this view.

The session card

Each session renders three rows:

• Name — from :session.rename, else a detected ticket via [ui] ticket_prefixes, else the OSC window title, else the profile label.
• Context — ⎇ <branch> · <cwd basename>.
• Status — a status chip, plus an optional ticket chip and an optional listening-port chip.

Elapsed since last output	Status	Color
< 2s	running	green
< 30s	recent	comment
otherwise	idle	grey
child exited	exited	red

The port chip lists any TCP ports the child is listening on (cached via a periodic lsof), so a Vite / Next / Playwright session shows :3000 without extra work. The header’s ⟳ clears that cache along with the render caches.

Ordering and pinning

SESSIONS wears the same header sort: chip as the three list panels, but over a different axis. Its rows are live panes, not files — there’s no mtime to order by, and “A–Z by session name” is a sort nobody asked for:

Mode	Config token	Order
State	auto	needs-approval first, then thinking/running, then idle, then exited
Manual	manual	the order your move commands produced

Left-click the chip to flip between them; right-click for the two-row menu. sessions.sort_auto and sessions.sort_manual are the palette routes. Either way the choice persists to [ui] sessions_sort.

The state tiers are read from each pane’s live output — a summary still mentioning approval reads as needs action, a live spinner as running — cached for 500 ms, since the sort runs on every frame. A session that finishes thinking drops a tier within half a second. Pinned sessions bubble to the top in either mode, in pane order.

Right-click a session card for the per-session menu: Pin / Unpin, Move up / Move down / Move to top / Move to bottom, Auto sort (with a ✓ when active), Rename…, a session color submenu, and Close session. Any move switches the mode to Manual and appends the session to the manual order. The card menu’s Auto sort row also clears that manual order — the state rules take over, so there’s nothing left to preserve — where the chip and the palette commands only change the mode.

+ New session

Left-click spawns a fresh Claude Code pane (ai.claude_code_new — the always-spawn command, not the reveal-or-open one, which no-opped when a pane was already focused). Right-click opens a batch menu: New session / Open ×2 / Open ×4 / Open ×8, for fanning out parallel Claudes without clicking eight times.

Filtering

The filter matches five fields at once — display name, profile label, git branch of the cwd, cwd basename, and detected ticket. That covers the common asks directly: type codex for the Codex tabs, te-1234 for one ticket’s sessions, refactor for everything on that branch.

Enter (or a click) reveals the cursored session — focusing its pane and walking up the layout tree if it lives in another leaf or tab page.

The panels with their own pages

Three more activity sections wear the same chrome but are documented in depth elsewhere:

• GIT (view.activity_git) — repo header, LOCAL / REMOTE / WORKTREES / PRS / STASHES / TAGS sections, each with its own count. The ⟳ re-discovers repos. See Git.
• HTTP (view.activity_http) — the seven-section sidebar (COLLECTIONS / FILES / ENVS / CHAINS / MOCKS / RECENT / CAPTURED), a collapse-all chip beside the refresh chip, and per-section chip clusters. Its filter narrows across every section at once, and a matching request name force-expands its collection so hits show without an extra click. See HTTP variables, edit split & panel filter.
• AGENTS / CLOUD AGENTS (view.activity_agents, view.activity_cloud_agents) — cross-workspace Claude / Codex dashboards grouped by status, and the ECS runner’s cloud rows with per-row Copy runId / Open CloudWatch / Open PR. Both carry a view: mode chip to the left of the refresh chip. See AI panes and Cloud agents runner (ECS).

Cross-panel comparison

	TODOs	Notes	Findings	Sessions
Source of rows	scan of workspace comments	.mnml/notes/*.md	.mnml/findings/*.md	AI Pty panes
Order	sort: chip, four modes	sort: chip, four modes	sort: chip, four modes	sort: chip: pinned, then State / Manual
Scan trigger	activation, ⟳, auto (2s throttle)	activation, ⟳, auto	activation, ⟳, auto	continuous (live)
Header count	always; + when the scan capped	always	always	always
Filter matches	tag / path / title	filename	relative name	name / label / branch / cwd / ticket
Row activation	opens file at line	opens the note	opens the report	reveals + focuses the pane
Create chip	+ New todo	+ New note	+ New finding	+ New session
Row right-click	AI actions on the marker	file actions	file actions	pin / move / rename / color / close

Next

• Activity bar — the icon strip that switches between these sections
• AI panes — the Claude Code / Codex panes the Sessions panel lists
• Git — what lives inside the GIT panel’s six sections
• HTTP variables, edit split & panel filter — the HTTP panel’s variant of the same filter shape
• Tabs, splits & tab pages — the tab strips these panels’ rows open into