Find your way around the Moonpool hub window

1. Two of the running apps: a lit status dot and a stop button instead of play.
2. The tab strip, one tab per opened app, with the active tab highlighted.
3. Live output from the active app.
4. The CPU and memory status bar.

Layout

Area	What it holds
Title bar	Minimize, maximize and close.
Sidebar	The filter box, the … menu, and your apps grouped by group. See Sidebar and menus.
CLI pane	One terminal tab per opened app. See Terminal tabs.
Status bar	Live CPU and memory, along the bottom.

Drag the divider between the sidebar and the CLI pane to resize the sidebar.

Status bar

The status bar shows one thin bar per CPU core (hover for “Per-core CPU usage”), then a memory bar with a used/total GB label. Turn it off with Show CPU/memory status bar in Settings (showStatusbar; see Settings window). The change applies immediately.

The … menu

The … button left of the filter box opens the menu.

1. The … menu button.
2. The Filter apps… box.

Item	Does
Add app	Opens the app editor. See Adding apps.
Edit apps.json	Opens apps.json in your default editor for hand editing.
Reload	Re-reads apps.json from disk (also F5, see Shortcuts and zoom).
Settings	Opens the Settings window.
Help	Opens this help.
About	Opens the About window, with the version and update check.
Install Moonpool…	Windows only. Opens the installer window, to install the app or make a portable copy. See Installing and Portable mode.

Port conflict warning

If two apps in apps.json use the same port, a warning row appears at the bottom of the menu, for example:

port 3000: App A / App B

Hover it for the full sentence. Fix the clash in apps.json or the app editor; the row disappears once no port is shared.

When apps.json has an error

If Reload (or F5) finds that apps.json no longer parses or validates, Moonpool keeps the list it already had. A banner at the top of the sidebar says “apps.json has an error, showing the last list that loaded”, followed by the error (hover it for the full text). The list below is dimmed but still works, so you can start and stop apps as usual. Edit apps.json in the banner opens the file; fix it and choose Reload, and the banner goes away.

Until the file loads again, Moonpool will not save changes from the app editor, rename, delete or set icon, so a bad file is never overwritten.

If the file is already broken when Moonpool starts, there is no earlier list to keep: the banner says no apps are loaded and the sidebar is empty. Fix the file and reload, or roll back to a recent good copy (see If the file is bad).

Empty screen

With no tab open, the CLI pane shows “Pick an app on the left to launch it.” It also holds two things that appear only while no tab is open:

• The update banner, when a newer version was found at startup. See Updating.
• Copy prompt, a ready-made prompt that hands setting up your apps to an AI agent. See AI agents: quick start.

The tray icon, closing, minimizing, Quit and always on top are on Tray, close and minimize.

Size, position and maximized state

Moonpool remembers the hub window’s size, position and maximized state between runs. The first run opens at 1200x780, at the position Windows picks.

If the saved position is no longer on any connected display (for example an unplugged monitor), the position is ignored and the saved size is used at the default location. The file is window-state.json in the config folder (see Where the config lives).

The sidebar width and whether the CLI pane is collapsed are remembered too.