Cate

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An infinite canvas for your code, terminals, browsers, docs, and AI agents.

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Cate is a desktop IDE built on an infinite canvas. Instead of stacking windows and tabs, you spread editors, terminals, browsers, documents, and AI agents across freeform space and arrange them however you think about the project. Float panels on the canvas, dock them into tabs and splits, or detach them into their own OS windows. Cate restores everything when you reopen the folder.

Getting started

Open a folder. Cate makes it a workspace and brings back your layout, panel positions, and terminals each time you return. Right-click the canvas to add panels, press Cmd+K for the command palette, and drag panels onto the dock to build tabs and splits. There are no config files to set up.

Why a canvas?

Alt-tab is fine until you have a dozen terminals, six open files, docs in another window, and notes spread across desktops. Past that point, finding the right window is the bottleneck.

Cate gives each project one canvas that remembers where you left things. This is not a window manager. Tiling WMs like Hyprland, Niri, and GlazeWM arrange OS windows for everything you run; Cate arranges the tools for a single project, closer to Figma than to a WM.

What's inside

Canvas and layout. Zoom and pan an infinite canvas, dock panels into tabs and splits across four zones, detach panels into separate windows, and save named layouts. Keep several projects open and restore them on restart.

Editors and terminals. Monaco editor panels with syntax highlighting, multi-cursor, find/replace, diffs, and Markdown preview. Native xterm.js terminals backed by node-pty, rooted in the workspace with shell auto-detection. Document panels render PDFs, DOCX, and images.

Git. A git-aware file tree with live watching and search, plus a source-control sidebar for staging, branches, worktrees, history, and inline diffs. Full-text project search.

AI agents. Run an in-app coding agent (Pi) with chat threads and per-chat model memory. Connect Anthropic, OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot, Gemini, OpenRouter, Groq, Mistral, DeepSeek, and others via OAuth or API key. Install extensions from the marketplace.

Navigation. Canvas-wide search across files, terminal scrollback, and panel titles (Cmd+Shift+F). Panel switcher (Ctrl+Space). Command palette (Cmd+K).

Install

Download a prebuilt release. Don't build from source for daily use.

Platform	Formats	Link
macOS	DMG, ZIP (arm64, x64)	Latest release
Windows	NSIS installer, ZIP (x64)	Latest release
Linux	AppImage, DEB, tar.gz (x64)	Latest release

macOS: release builds are notarized. Unsigned local builds may need xattr -cr /Applications/Cate.app.

Linux: on Steam Deck or read-only-root distros, use the tar.gz build. If the AppImage won't launch, try ./Cate.AppImage --no-sandbox.

Build from source

For contributors. Use the release above otherwise.

Prerequisites:

• Node.js 20 or 22 LTS (see .nvmrc). Node 23+ fails: node-pty has no prebuilds and native compilation breaks.
• npm >= 9
• Python 3 and a C++ compiler for node-pty:
  • macOS: xcode-select --install
  • Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install build-essential python3
  • Fedora/RHEL: sudo dnf install @development-tools gcc-c++ make python3
  • Arch: sudo pacman -S base-devel python
  • Windows: Visual Studio Build Tools with the "Desktop development with C++" workload

git clone https://github.com/0-AI-UG/cate.git
cd cate
npm install

npm run dev          # dev server with hot reload
npm run typecheck
npm test             # unit tests (vitest)
npm run test:e2e     # Playwright integration tests
npm run build        # production build
npm run package      # package for distribution (:mac, :win, :linux)

Packaged binaries land in release/.

Architecture

src/
├── agent/      # Embedded Pi coding-agent: process manager, auth, marketplace, panel UI
├── main/       # Electron main process: IPC, workspaces, windows, updater, security
├── preload/    # Context-isolated IPC bridge
├── renderer/   # React 18 app: canvas, docking, panels, sidebar, stores, hooks
└── shared/     # IPC channels and shared types

Cate runs all IPC through a context-isolated preload bridge. Filesystem access is scoped to registered workspace roots, browser panels disable node integration, and terminals can't spawn outside approved directories.

Stack: Electron 41, React 18, Zustand 5, Monaco 0.52, xterm.js 5.5 + node-pty 1.0, Tailwind 3.4, electron-vite, electron-builder, electron-updater, Sentry. PDFs and DOCX via pdf.js and mammoth, git via simple-git, file watching via chokidar. The agent runtime is @earendil-works/pi.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md. Release-by-release history lives in the CHANGELOG.

Star history

License

MIT