spacecake: a Claude Code desktop where the agent opens files and waits for you

Terminal, editor and task panel in one window

The pitch is three features in one application, and the reason they are together is that they are all views onto the same agent session.

There is an integrated terminal, a visual markdown editor, and live task tracking. The stated use is running agents, writing specs, and seeing what is happening in one place. Each of the three panels is dockable left, right or bottom, so the layout is a choice rather than a fixed arrangement, and they can sit next to each other in the same window.

The repository is a monorepo with three folders: spacecake-app/ for the desktop app, website/ for the landing page and the documentation at spacecake.ai, and cli/ for a command-line tool. The full documentation lives on that site rather than in the readme, which points at a getting-started page.

The licence is AGPL-3.0, which is worth noticing for a desktop wrapper. Anyone building on the source and putting it in a product has to think about network use and source availability, which is a heavier obligation than the MIT or Apache licences that most agent tools use.

Nothing in the project is described as open for extension in the readme, so the CLI folder is the piece to look at first if you want to script it.

Five installer shapes, and watchman on Linux and Windows

Distribution is by release installer, with a variant per platform and one extra for people who prefer to install manually.

On macOS the .dmg file comes in two architectures, arm64 for Apple Silicon and x64 for Intel, and there is a separate .zip for manual installation. Windows takes the .exe installer. Linux takes the .deb for Debian-based distributions such as Ubuntu, or an .AppImage for everything else.

One performance note is addressed at Linux and Windows users specifically: install watchman for the best file-watching performance, and the app shows a tip in the status bar recommending it. That is a real dependency on an external daemon, and it is the kind of thing that turns into a support question when the status bar tip is ignored.

The first launch opens the home folder, ~/.spacecake, described as a place for general notes. Opening a project as a workspace is then a keyboard command, ⌘O on macOS and ctrl+O elsewhere, which means the app opens to a scratch space rather than to a project.

That default is a small design statement: notes come before code, and a workspace is something you point the app at rather than something it starts in.

The editor is CodeMirror with wikilinks and a slash menu

The markdown editor is built on CodeMirror, which brings syntax highlighting, autocompletion, bracket closing, code folding, linting and the usual keyboard shortcuts. On top of that the readme lists the markdown-specific work.

There are proper code blocks with syntax highlighting, and a slash command menu that inserts code blocks, headings, frontmatter and more. Frontmatter support has both table and code view modes. Checklists and badges exist for agent execution plans, and diagrams are handled through mermaid.

Linking works in three ways: wikilinks in double bracket form for linking between workspace files with heading and block anchors, URL links for external resources, and the plain relative links a markdown file already has. Anchors matter more here than in a normal editor, because a spec document that an agent reads and rewrites tends to grow long enough that a link to a heading is the only stable reference.

Both WYSIWYG and live preview modes are offered, which is the standard compromise in this kind of editor: write in one view when you are typing and see the result in the other when you are checking. Autosave is available as a workspace setting, and light and dark mode toggle from the status bar.

Ghostty is embedded and plan mode comes on by itself

The terminal is Ghostty, embedded rather than launched. The point is to run CLI coding agents inside it, and the ones named are Claude Code, Codex and the Gemini CLI. Spec Kit is mentioned alongside them as the way to go beyond vibe-coding, which is the author's framing of what a markdown-first workspace is for.

Tabs work as expected: ⌘T or ctrl+T opens a new one, and ctrl+Tab cycles through them. The panel is dockable left, right or bottom, so the terminal can share space with the editor and the git panel rather than sitting full width.

The Claude Code integration is a separate subsection, and the plan mode line is the one to note. Plan mode is enabled by default when you run in the spacecake terminal, which means the agent proposes before it edits unless you turn that off. On a codebase where an agent can commit, a default of propose-first is a defensible choice, and it is also a default someone will want to change.

The status line is auto-configured on the first launch and shows live metrics: the model in use, the context percentage, and cost. Having cost on screen without opening a dashboard is the feature that changes how you run long sessions.

The agent opens a file and waits for you to close it

Five integration behaviours are described, and the last one is the most unusual.

Context awareness: the agent is told which file and line you are editing, so a request about the current selection does not need you to name a path.

Plan mode, enabled by default in the spacecake terminal, described above.

The status line, auto-configured on first launch, showing model, context percentage and cost.

A plans panel, opened with ctrl+G, for viewing and managing plans.

And open files: Claude can open files directly in the editor, and it waits for you to save and close before continuing.

That last behaviour is a handoff protocol rather than a display feature. An agent that edits a file directly races the person editing the same file, so the app instead hands the file to the editor, blocks the agent until the human has finished with it, and resumes after. It is a small idea with a large effect on whether you can keep working while an agent runs in the same repository.

The tasks panel completes the picture: it shows live Claude Code tasks from the active session, with status filters and sortable columns, dockable alongside the terminal and git panels.

Git lives in a dockable panel, conflicts get their own editor

The git integration is unusually complete for a wrapper app, and one entry in particular stands out.

Changes shows modified, staged and untracked files with inline diffs. Commit lets you select files, write a message and commit, with amend support. Branches can be created, switched and deleted from a popover. Sync does fetch, pull and push with ahead and behind indicators. Stash covers the quick stash, pop and drop. History browses recent commits with per-commit diffs. Clone and init sit behind a keyboard shortcut, ⌘⇧C, or the menu bar. And GitHub links let you view the repository or start a pull request from the same place.

The entry that stands out is merge conflicts: there is a dedicated conflict editor rather than a message telling you to leave the app. For a tool whose whole purpose is running agents that sometimes collide with your work, a conflict editor is the difference between resolving a collision in ten seconds and abandoning the session.

Inline diffs in the changes view complete the loop with the editor, since a change made by the agent appears as a diff you can read before you accept it rather than only in a commit log afterwards.

Workspace search is ripgrep with filters

Search is split into two, and the split is the useful part.

Find in file is ⌘F or ctrl+F, searching within the current file with match highlighting, navigation between matches, and toggles for case, whole word and regular expression.

Find in workspace is ⌘⇧F or ctrl+shift+F, and it is ripgrep-powered across all files, with include and exclude filters and results grouped by file. Grouping by file is the difference between a search you can read and a flat list of matches in the order they happened to appear.

The rest of the app is small and worth listing so it does not get lost. Autosave files on edit when enabled in workspace settings, and light and dark mode toggle from the status bar.

The keyboard shortcut table covers the common ones: open workspace on ⌘O, quick open file on ⌘P, find in file, find in workspace, new file, focus editor, toggle sidebar, close tab, save file, save all files, toggle terminal on ctrl+backtick, new terminal tab, and open plans on ctrl+G. The full list is on the documentation site rather than in the readme.

Public alpha, alpha.71, and a push from 6 May

The status is stated at the top of the readme and it is the first thing to weigh. The app is in public alpha, and the instruction is to open an issue in the repository or join the Discord server if you find bugs.

The releases support that. The three most recent are v0.1.0-alpha.71 on 18 April 2026, v0.1.0-alpha.70 on 11 April, and v0.1.0-alpha.69 on 10 April. A weekly alpha cadence with the version pinned at 0.1.0 means you install an alpha, and the number after alpha is what tells you which one.

The last push is dated 6 May 2026 on main, so there has been no commit in about five months. The releases stop earlier than that, in April, which means the packaged builds trail the branch by a month and the branch itself has been quiet since early May.

For anyone planning to build on it, the practical arrangements are in place. The top level holds a .devcontainer/ directory alongside CONTRIBUTING.md, which covers prerequisites and setup for building from source, and the desktop app's own CHANGELOG.md lists releases and changes. The product is also listed on Product Hunt.

None of that makes the alpha promise go away, but a devcontainer and a separate changelog are signs of a project that intends to be buildable by other people.

Editorial conclusion

spacecake is for someone who runs agents all day and has accepted that the terminal is the wrong shape for a workspace. Its value is the integration detail, not the chrome: the agent is told which file and line you are editing, plan mode comes on by itself, and a file the agent opens blocks it until you close it. Two things to weigh before adopting it. It is in public alpha with the last release at v0.1.0-alpha.71 and the last push on 6 May 2026, so expect churn, and it is AGPL-3.0, which is a different set of obligations from the permissive licences most agent tooling ships under. Build it from CONTRIBUTING.md if the packaged installers do not suit your platform.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. License: AGPL-3.0
2. Project website
3. README
4. Releases
5. spacecake-labs/spacecake on GitHub