The workspace

One primary screen with three vertical regions and a mode rail. You will live here most of the time — everything else is a mode swap in the centre or a dialog.

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  wobu   [ Ashfall ▾ ]   Species / Vashk / Kael Vantris     ⌕ Jump to…      ⚙︎    │ title bar
├────┬────────────────────┬────────────────────────────┬───────────────────────────┤
│ ▤  │ ⌕ Filter world…    │ KAEL VANTRIS   saved Enhance│  INFLUENCE STACK         │
│ ▦  │ 812 entities  ⌄all │ character · inherits Vashk ·│  ┌──────────────────────┐│
│ ✦  │                    │─────────────────────────────│  │ ● Art Style      1.0 ▸││
│    │ ★ Art Style        │ Notes │ Refs │ Concepts │ 3D│  ├──────────────────────┤│
│ ⚙  │ ★ World Canon      │       │      │          │ Rel│ │ ● World Canon    0.8 ▸││
│    │                    │─────────────────────────────│  ├──────────────────────┤│
│    │ ▾ Favourites       │ ┌───────────┬──────────────┐│  │ ● Ancestry · Vashk   ▸││
│    │ ▾ Recent           │ │ RAW NOTES │ ENHANCED     ││  ├──────────────────────┤│
│    │ ▾ Species          │ │  yours    │ from Enhance ││  │ ● Culture · Ember G. ▸││
│    │    Vashk           │ │           │ Silhouette   ││  ├──────────────────────┤│
│    │ ▾ Cultures         │ │ scarred   │ Anatomy      ││  │ COMPILED PROMPT       ││
│    │    Ember Guild     │ │ ex-guild  │ Materials    ││  │ ▓▓▓▓ tinted by layer  ││
│    │ ▾ Settings         │ │ …         │ Palette      ││  ├──────────────────────┤│
│    │  ▾ Ember Coast     │ │           │ Signature    ││  │ Preset ▾   Aspect ▾   ││
│    │     Cinder Bay     │ │           │ Never        ││  │ Seed · Variant grid   ││
│    │ ▾ Characters       │ └───────────┴──────────────┘│  │    ✦ Generate         ││
│    │    Kael Vantris ◀  │                             │  └──────────────────────┘│
│    │ + New entity       │                             │                          │
├────┴────────────────────┴─────────────────────────────┴──────────────────────────┤
│ Ashfall · /vol/Ashfall.wobu · 812 entities · ComfyUI connected · queue 0 · ⏱4.2s  │ status
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
   rail          navigator                 editor                    inspector

Mode rail

Icon-only, always visible on the far left. Four destinations, which keeps the top bar clean and makes switching muscle memory. Each button's tooltip carries its current shortcut, read live from the keyboard registry — so if you rebind it, the tooltip moves with it.

The navigator and the inspector belong to Library. In Forge, Assets and Settings they are not collapsed but absent — the mode gets the whole width.

Title bar

A custom title bar, so the chrome matches on Linux, macOS and Windows. Left to right: the wobu mark, the project menu (click the project name for its full path, Share this project… and Close project), a read-only badge when the folder is not writable, and the influence breadcrumb for the selected entity. Every crumb is clickable and jumps to that entity. On the right, Jump to… opens the command palette, and the gear opens Settings.

Navigator

Resizable by dragging its right edge, and collapsible from the keyboard.

• Filter box at the top — placeholder Filter world… — matches entity names and one-line summaries. For searching inside notes and descriptions, use the command palette instead; the navigator says so when nothing matches.
• A count and a collapse control. 812 entities, or 14 of 812 shown while filtering, and one button that reads Collapse all or Expand all. Collapsing closes every kind group and leaves the state inside them alone, so re-opening a group returns you to the shape you had.
• Two pinned singletons — Art Style and World Canon — sit above the rule, because they root every influence stack.
• Favourites and Recent sections come first. Favourites are the rows you starred, listed alphabetically; Recent is the handful of entities you have opened lately and appears only in worlds large enough to need it. Both are shortcuts into the tree below, not a second copy of it — you cannot drag them.
• A group per kind, each nesting by parent. Regions contain cities contain districts.
• Alphabetical bands appear inside a group once it has too many top-level rows to scan — A–E, F, M, and # for everything that does not start with a letter. They start closed.
• A thumbnail per row, so a species you have already drawn is recognisable without reading. Rows with no picture keep the same slot, filled with the kind's icon, so nothing shifts.
• Drag to re-parent. Dropping an entity onto another moves it in the hierarchy — and therefore changes what it inherits. Only within the same kind; dropping onto a group header moves it to the top level.
• Right-click for New, New child, favourite, Duplicate and Delete. Singletons cannot be duplicated or deleted.
• Status dots. An entity whose description has gone stale gets a small dot; an entity someone else has open in another copy of Wobu gets a presence dot.

Broken files If a file in the project folder cannot be parsed — a sync client mangled it, or a hand edit broke the frontmatter — Wobu lists it at the top of the navigator with the parser's own error and offers Show in folder and Reload. It never silently skips a file, and it never writes over one it could not read.

Editor

The fluid centre column, and the place you actually author.

Header

An inline-editable name, a kind badge, a stale badge when the description has drifted from the notes, the inherits line listing the layers above this entity, the autosave state, and the Enhance button in the violet AI accent. Wobu saves as you type on a delay you can tune in Settings → Editor.

Tabs

Five tabs, each with a shortcut shown in its tooltip:

The Notes split

Two columns. Left is yours, right is the machine's — the left is tagged yours and the right written by Enhance. That spatial split is the mental model of the whole app: Wobu never writes into your column, and you can always edit its column. Covered in Notes and Enhance.

Inspector

On the right, collapsible. This is the differentiating panel, and it has no tabs — three sections stacked in one column:

1. Influence stack — the layers feeding this generation, outermost first, with the provider's reference budget across the top.
2. Compiled prompt — the exact text that will be sent, with a Show sources toggle that tints every fragment by the layer that produced it.
3. Shot controls — output preset, aspect, model, an extra shot prompt, seed, the variant grid, the project's spend ceiling, and Generate.

Each layer card carries a thumbnail or a colour dot, the source entity, a count of the text and image fragments it contributed and how many were dropped, a weight slider, a mute toggle and an Open source button. The full explanation is in The influence stack.

The one rule worth internalising Muting or reweighting in the inspector affects this generation only. It never edits your world. Editing the world happens in the editor. If you find yourself muting the same layer every time, that is a signal to go and fix the entity.

Status bar

Along the bottom in every mode, and mostly read-only: project name and path, whether the folder is a network share or read-only, sync state and connected peers, how many other people have it open, the entity count, which panels are hidden, provider health and the active image model, the job queue depth, the text model and its context size, and a timer for the running generation.

Two things in it are buttons. queue n switches to Forge, and notifications opens the notification centre.

The notification centre

Toasts vanish; some failures should not. Anything that failed — a generation the provider refused, a save the share rejected, a job that cost money and produced nothing — is kept here with what it cost, what went wrong in the provider's own words, and where to go next: Open Settings, Open in Forge or Show the entity. Opening the panel marks everything read; Clear all empties it.

Command palette

From anywhere, and deliberately reachable mid-sentence — it is how you leave where you are. It searches in two phases: entity names and summaries match instantly, then full-text hits from inside notes and descriptions arrive a moment later, ranked by the search index. Results are grouped Entities, In notes and descriptions and Commands. Arrow keys move, Enter picks, Escape closes.

The commands are New entity, Undo, Redo, Toggle navigator, Toggle inspector and Keyboard shortcuts. On a read-only folder the ones that write are absent rather than disabled.

Pickers

Anywhere Wobu has more than a handful of choices — the output preset, an aspect, a relation target, a parent entity, an asset filter — the control is a searchable combobox rather than a dropdown. Type to filter, arrows to move, Enter to take, Escape to abandon the search and keep what you had. It announces how many results it has, options that are offered but unavailable say so rather than disappearing, and lists of thousands of entities stay responsive because only the visible rows are drawn. Genuine five-item enums are still plain dropdowns.

Appearance

Settings → Appearance carries a Theme — Match system, Light or Dark — and an Interface scale. Both themes carry the same palette: the six influence-layer colours stay distinguishable from one another, including under the common forms of colour-vision deficiency, and text keeps its contrast either way. Match system follows the desktop as it changes rather than freezing whatever it was when you chose it.

The interface scale scales the whole interface rather than only the text, because the navigator and inspector are fixed widths and type alone would grow inside boxes that did not.

← Your first project  ·  Entities and hierarchy →

This page is rendered from its source in the repository — the same file the application reads for its built-in guide.