The interface at a glance

Aletheia has a stable shell that's the same on every surface: a top bar, a left notebooks pane, the active surface in the middle, and a status bar along the bottom. Learn it once.

The shell: top bar (surfaces + quick find), notebooks pane (left), the active surface (center), and the status bar (bottom).

The top bar

Left to right:

• The ALETHEIA wordmark — clicking it returns you to the Editor.
• Surface tabs — Editor · Search · Chat · Settings. These are the four surfaces of the app. The active one is underlined in the accent orange. You can also jump with single-key shortcuts (e, s, c, ,) when no text field is focused — see Keyboard shortcuts.
• Quick find (⌘K / Ctrl+K) — a global palette that searches notes, entities, tags, and commands. The fastest way to jump anywhere.

The top bar, left to right: **①** Editor · **②** Search · **③** Chat · **④** Settings · **⑤** Quick find.

Four surfaces, by design

Earlier builds had separate Browse, Dashboards, and Graph surfaces; the shipping app deliberately contracts to Editor, Search, Chat, Settings. Entities, tags, action items, sources, and corpus health didn't disappear — they moved into those four (the editor sidecar, and Settings' sub-tabs). This manual documents the four-surface app.

The notebooks pane (left)

Your folder tree. My Notes at the top is the everything-view; below it, your notebooks nest and expand. Pinned notes sit up top; Trash sits at the bottom. Each notebook row shows a live note count and a small dot. You can collapse the whole pane with the chevron to reclaim width. Full detail in Notebooks, Inbox & Trash.

The notebooks pane: My Notes at the top, your nesting notebooks below, each row with a live count.

The active surface (center)

Whatever you're doing lives here:

• Editor — write and read notes; the default home. When no note is open it shows the workspace: a filterable table of your whole library (pictured above).
• Search — hybrid / semantic / lexical retrieval with facet filters.
• Chat — ask questions across the corpus; get cited answers.
• Settings — appearance, identity, autorouter, sources, health, and the MCP connection.

The status bar (bottom)

A quiet health readout that's always present: a Healthy indicator, live counts of your notes · chunks · tags · entities, and subsystem status (retrieval · edges · db). If something's degraded, you'll see it here first. The counts are also a satisfying way to watch extraction catch up after a burst of writing.

The always-on status bar: **①** the Healthy indicator · **②** chunk count · **③** entity count.

The command palette (⌘K)

Quick find / command palette — type to jump to any note, entity, tag, or command.

Press ⌘K (macOS) or Ctrl+K (Windows/Linux) anywhere. Start typing and it searches across notes, entities, tags, and commands at once. Arrow keys to move, Enter to go, Esc to close. It's the single shortcut most worth committing to muscle memory.

Quick find open, ready for input — just start typing to jump to any note, entity, tag, or command.

Next: First run & signing in →