Project Navigator

The Project Navigator is ThinkForge's primary workspace — a three-panel interface for browsing, organizing, searching, and understanding your project content.

It combines a folder tree, switchable content views, document relationships, analytics, and AI tools in one place. Everything you see maps to real files and folders on your computer.

Layout

The Project Navigator uses a three-panel layout:

  • Left panel — the sidebar with your folder tree, workspaces, pinned items, recents, tags, Smart Clipboard, and agent tools
  • Center panel — the main content area with switchable view modes
  • Right panel — Document Info showing metadata, tags, links, and actions for the selected item

The left sidebar is also available as a standalone floating window — see Floating Explorer.

Sidebar sections

The left sidebar is organized into collapsible sections, each with its own icon. You can reorder, show, or hide sections to match your workflow.

  • Smart Clipboard — a temporary stack of your last 8 clipboard copies. Text, files, folders, and images are captured automatically. Click to paste, drag to move.
  • Workspaces — saved working sessions that restore a set of open documents, focus areas, and goals. Create new workspaces to organize different phases of work.
  • Pinned — files and folders you pinned for quick access. Pin anything from its context menu.
  • Shortcuts — user-defined jump links to documents, folders, tags, automations, or workspaces.
  • Recents — recently opened files from the current project, or across all projects.
  • Tags — document tags from semantic memory, with item counts. Click a tag to filter the content area.
  • Folders — the physical file tree rooted at your project directory. What you see here matches what exists on disk.
  • Automations — automation scripts for your project, shown when automations exist.
  • Tool Library — your saved agents and tools, organized in folders.
  • Deployed Tools — agents configured for runtime use, ready to execute.

Center views

The center panel offers multiple ways to look at your project. Switch between them using the toolbar:

  • Content — the default file browser. Documents appear as cards in a grid or as a list. Click to select, double-click to open. Supports folder filtering, search, and multi-select.
  • Home — a dashboard with summary cards for workspaces, pinned items, shortcuts, recents, and tags. A quick orientation view when you open a project.
  • Workspace — shows recent activity and saved sessions so you can pick up where you left off.
  • Insights — project analytics showing hub documents (most linked), orphans (no connections), link intent distribution, and recent linking activity.
  • Clusters — a spatial map of all indexed documents positioned by content similarity. See Cluster Graph for details.
  • Automation — a freeform canvas where you place documents and agent tools, draw connections, and build automation chains.

Document relationships

ThinkForge tracks two kinds of relationships between documents:

  • Manual links — connections you create deliberately. Each link has an intent (related, supports, depends on, etc.) that describes the relationship. Create them from the Document Info panel or document focus view.
  • Smart links — AI-suggested connections based on content similarity. ThinkForge automatically identifies documents that share related content and shows them with a similarity score. You can promote a smart link to a manual link if the relationship is important to preserve.

When you select a document, the right panel shows both its manual links and smart link suggestions. The Insights view aggregates these relationships across the entire project.

The folder tree

The Folders section shows your actual project directory. What you see here matches what exists on disk. Creating, renaming, deleting, or moving items in the navigator changes the real files.

ThinkForge hides system and build folders that are not useful for browsing:

  • Hidden folders (anything starting with ., including the .fire system folder)
  • Build and tool folders like bin, obj, node_modules, dist, .git, and .vs

The _captured folder is special — it is where ThinkForge saves new imports and browser captures by default.

Working with files

  • Single-click a file to select it and preview it in the content area
  • Double-click a file to open it in a full editor tab
  • Single-click a folder to filter the content area to that folder's contents
  • Right-click any item for a context menu with actions like rename, delete, pin, copy path, add to Smart Clipboard, move to another project, or run an agent

Multi-selection is supported with Ctrl+click (toggle individual items) and Shift+click (select a range). Drag and drop moves files and folders within the tree, updating their location on disk and in semantic memory.

Standard file operations are available throughout: create folders and files (Markdown, HTML, JSON, CSV, text), rename, delete, copy or move to other projects, and organize with pins, shortcuts, and workspaces.

Search

A Search tab sits alongside the main tree. It provides three search modes:

Results appear in the same layout as the tree, so you can open or act on them the same way. The toolbar also includes a search bar that runs hybrid search (keyword + semantic) across the content area.

View modes

The sidebar tree offers three display styles you can cycle through:

  • Modern — larger rows with hover actions (pin, Smart Clipboard) and file size details
  • Compact — tighter spacing for projects with many files
  • Classic — minimal, traditional tree view

Activity heatmap

An optional activity heatmap shows colored bars on each file and folder indicating recent editing activity. You can view activity over 7, 30, or 90 days, or set a custom date range. This helps you quickly see where you have been working and which areas of the project are most active.

A related feature, folder focus dimming, dims branches of the tree that are unrelated to your current selection, reducing visual noise when you are focused on a specific area.

Custom filter tabs

You can create additional sidebar tabs with the + button. Each custom tab shows only the sections you choose — for example, just Recents and Pinned, or just Tags and Tools. Close a custom tab with a right-click.

Document focus

Clicking a document in Content view opens a focus view that shows the document's indexed content, all manual and smart links, assigned tags, and file metadata. From here you can add tags, create links, pin the document, add it to a workspace, or run an agent with it as context.

Floating Explorer

The left sidebar is available as a standalone Floating Explorer — an always-on-top window you can position anywhere on screen, dock to a screen edge, and configure per application. It includes the same sections, search, and context menus as the docked sidebar, plus quick actions for notes and clipboard capture.

Related