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Apps overview

The native app surface and what ships in the box.

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What a TDE app is

An app is a window inside the desktop, not a program you install. Every first-party app is compiled into the single tde binary: opening one does not download anything, does not resolve a PATH entry and does not spawn a process. The desktop calls straight into the app's code and hands it a window.

That has three consequences worth knowing:

They are always available. There is no install step and no "not found" state — an app you can see in the Start menu will open.
They are always the same version as the desktop. Updating TDE updates all of them at once; there is nothing to update per app.
They never appear in the Store. The Store is for third-party terminal apps. Native apps are marked start-only, so they are listed in the Launcher and the Start menu and nowhere else.

Two natives are the exception to "no process": TDE UI Demo and the games re-invoke the same tde binary in a terminal window rather than running in-process. It is still the binary you already have.

Apps are single-instance — asking for TDE Files again focuses the window you already have. TDE Shell is the exception: every shell is its own window.

Launching an app

Surface	How to open it	What it shows
Launcher	`Super`, or `Alt+Space`	One ranked, fuzzy-searched list of everything
Start menu	`F1`, or `Alt+A`	A grid of installed apps, filtered by category
Store	`F2`, or `Alt+S`	Third-party apps only
Notch	Click a chip in the top bar	Your own shortcuts

Launcher

The Launcher is a command palette. Typing filters by substring first and falls back to subsequence matching, so tdb finds TDE-Database. It shows at most 14 rows, and with an empty query it shows a short default set.

Results are ranked, not just filtered. In descending priority: anything that parses as a URL, then running windows, then apps you have installed, then built-in system commands, then per-app command-palette rows, then Store apps you have not installed, then recent files. So typing a URL and pressing Enter opens the browser, and typing the name of an app you already have open focuses it instead of relaunching.

F1 opens a Start-menu style overlay with a search row, a category sidebar and the app grid. Categories are derived from the apps themselves — Internet, Database, Editor, Office, Developer, Network, AI Agents, System, Git, Monitor, Games — so the sidebar only ever lists categories that have something in them.

Notch

The Notch is the centred bar at the top of the screen. It is not an app list; it is a strip of shortcut chips you configure. Out of the box it carries Apps, Shell, Files, Web, Chat and Control. See Notch, taskbar and launcher for the chrome and notch.toml for the file.

Your own launcher entries

Any .toml file in ~/.config/tde/commands/ adds rows to the Launcher. The full schema is on the configuration page; what matters here is the action field, because a bare built-in id opens a native app directly:

launcher · terminal · shell · files · editor · browser · git · pr · database · redis · api · docs · sheets · email · hosts · process · container · env · webhook · vercel · mermaid · aichat · wiper · store · control · myloop

~/.config/tde/commands/review.toml

[[commands]]
app = "Review"
title = "Open TDE Git"
action = "git"

[[commands]]
app = "Review"
title = "Open the API client"
action = "api"

From a shell

Only two apps have a direct CLI entry point:

bash

tde games          # list the bundled games
tde games snake    # launch one
tde ui-demo        # the component gallery

There is no tde <app> command for the rest. Native apps are opened from inside the desktop, or by an agent through tde agent run.

Every app in the box

App	What it does	Where it is documented
TDE Files	Mouse-first file manager: three panes, previews, archives, pinned Places, SFTP hosts, Trash.	Files, Code and Shell
TDE Code	The native code editor — a behavioural port of `nino`, with tree-sitter syntax and a real LSP client.	Files, Code and Shell
TDE Shell	The desktop's terminal, wrapping your real `$SHELL` with a Rust line editor.	Files, Code and Shell
TDE Browser	A real Chromium driven over CDP and painted into terminal cells.	Browser
TDE Email	Multi-account IMAP mail with a Markdown composer; hosts the Calendar pane.	Email and Calendar
TDE Docs	Mouse-first document editor that saves `.md` and `.docx`.	Docs and Sheets
TDE Sheets	Spreadsheet with formulas; reads `.xlsx`, `.xls`, `.ods`, `.csv` and `.tsv`, writes `.xlsx`.	Docs and Sheets
TDE Inspect	Postman-style HTTP client with Collections plus project API discovery, provenance review and safe rescan.	Inspect API discovery
TDE Database	Multi-engine SQL studio; its profiles become MCP servers for your agents.	Data apps
TDE Redis	Mouse-first Redis client: key browser, per-type editors, pub/sub, Lua.	Data apps
TDE Tests	Discovers hybrid project test runners and runs all, failed, changed or affected tests.	TDE Tests
TDE Process	Process viewer and killer, `pik`-inspired.	Ops apps
TDE Container	Docker containers over the socket — list, inspect, logs, start, stop, restart, remove.	Ops apps
TDE Env	Editor for a project's `.env*` files, plus a session view of the system environment.	Ops apps
TDE Webhook	Local inbound webhook receiver and request inspector.	Ops apps
TDE Vercel	Deployment monitor: list, build logs, cancel.	Ops apps
TDE Git	The changes app — branch picker, staging tree, unified or split diff, inline review notes.	Git, diff and PR review
TDE PR	Browse and review your GitHub pull requests through the `gh` CLI.	Git, diff and PR review
AI Chat	Conversational window over your personas and CLIs (including TDE Pass and local Ollama). Conversations run independently; closing the window does not cancel in-flight replies. Image and document attachments resolve before the tool loop — see Agents and personas.	Agents and personas
Hosts	An SSH cockpit: merges `~/.ssh/config` with a TDE registry, opens a terminal on the selected host, manages port forwards.	This page
Wiper	Disk-usage analyser — drill into a tree and see what is eating the disk, biggest first, with a delete action.	This page
TDE UI Demo	Navigable catalogue of the component library, for people building TDE apps.	Design system
Games	2048, Mines, Snake, Words and Boxes, on a shared shell with pause, help and persistent high scores.	This page

That is the first-party app list as the Start menu shows it. A few more first-party surfaces exist but are not entries in that list:

Surface	What it is
My Loop (Board)	The pipeline window. The kanban board is a section inside it, not a separate app — see My Loop overview.
Store	The marketplace window for third-party apps — Store overview.
Control Center	Settings, connectors and toggles — Control Center.
Mermaid	Renders `flowchart` and `graph` source as a terminal card canvas. From a My Loop task it opens the persisted Change Map, falling back to the live worktree diff for older tasks.
Media / PDF viewer	Has no launcher entry at all: it opens when you open a PDF or an image. It covers `pdf`, `png`, `jpg`, `jpeg`, `gif` (animated included), `webp`, `bmp` and `ico` — there is no video support. It also supplies the preview embedded in TDE Files.
Devbox	Not an app. An integration that reads a project's manifests (`package.json`, `Cargo.toml`, `go.mod`, …), writes a `devbox.json` at the project root and lets a task open a terminal already inside `devbox shell`. It writes the file directly, so it works even before the `devbox` binary is installed.

Which app opens a file

When you activate a file in TDE Files, the choice is made in a fixed order:

TDE Sheets for xlsx, xls, ods, csv, tsv.
TDE Docs for docx, md, txt.
The media viewer for pdf and the raster image types above.
Your own file association from config.toml, if one matches.
TDE Code for the source and config extensions it claims — json, jsonc, toml, yaml, yml, sql, md, txt, rs, js, ts, tsx, jsx, py, go, sh, bash, zsh, fish, lua, css, html, xml, env, ini, conf, log.
Otherwise the host's xdg-open.

Because steps 1–3 run before your override, a [[default_apps.files]] entry cannot currently take md away from TDE Docs or png away from the viewer. The association table ships empty; adding entries is covered under Configuration.