Beyond one window

Reading and writing in the Hub

How a conversation is read and written from the Hub, and what is never sent for you: text waits in the session's terminal until you press Enter.

Every way into a conversation opens the Hub: Open in the Hub in a row's menu, ⌘ click on a row, Open the Hub in the panel's ⋯ menu or the lamp's, or lampboard chat 3 for the row in slot 3.

Reading

A session LampBoard has a terminal into is shown at the Hub's centre, in its own terminal: a session in tmux, here or on another machine, and a background session of this Mac. You read it there, scroll it and type to it as to any terminal.

A session in VS Code's panel or in the Claude app has no terminal of LampBoard's, so the Hub reads its transcript instead, and nothing is written to it. Its row's menu offers Show in VS Code or Show in the Claude app to go and see it where it lives. A conversation open in VS Code also offers Move to LampBoard…, which ends the editor's process between turns and takes the conversation up as a background session of this Mac, with everything it remembers. From then on it opens in its own terminal. Close the conversation's tab in VS Code afterwards: a message typed there would be refused.

Writing

Off by default. Turn on Send messages to sessions in Settings › Acting from the panel. Until you do, the Hub reads and nothing else: no listener, nothing that can start a turn in your name. The dialog explains that before you agree to it.

Text is never sent for you. A handoff, a LampMaster card's question and @name message from ⌘K wait in the session's terminal in the Hub, for you to read, change and send with Enter. Where LampBoard has no terminal into a session, a handoff and a card are copied to paste where they go, and @name message goes into the session's own message box, when it has one.

From the bar: ⌘K, then @name and the message, such as @api run the tests, then Return. The Hub opens on that session with the message waiting in its terminal, unsent.

Through Claude Code's own message box, when the session has one (Claude Code 2.1.224 or later, on this Mac): LampBoard puts the message there. An idle session starts a turn on it at once; a busy one takes it into the turn it is running. Claude Code holds it to the session's own permissions: it can ask for work, never grant itself more.

Asking without disturbing: @name ?question asks the session a quick question and shows the answer in the bar, without interrupting it. It needs the helper.

Handing over: /handoff @from @to asks the first session for what the second one needs, and proposes it into the second session's terminal in the Hub, to read, change and send.

What is gone

The extended window with its conversation list and composer, the Session view beside the panel, the Chat and the Files of a live window, and dictation. macOS's own dictation into a terminal has not been tried, so nothing is promised for it.

With them went the per-turn cost and tool timeline of the old Session view, and citing a range of lines from a file. A session in VS Code cannot be written to from the Hub until it is moved with Move to LampBoard….