Spaces

A Space is a place to work. It's the room you step into, where you open things, arrange your work, and come back tomorrow. Think of it like a desktop, but designed for the way you actually work: fluid, contextual, and personal.

You can have as many Spaces as you want. One per project, one per client, one for personal life, one for the morning routine. Each Space remembers what was open, where things were arranged, and what conversation you were having with River AI inside it.

What lives inside a Space#

Every Space contains:

• Open Windows — the entities you're currently working on
• A SpaceChat thread — your AI conversation, scoped to this Space
• A sidebar — quick access to entities relevant to this Space
• A layout — how the Windows are arranged on the canvas

Closing a Space doesn't delete anything. Reopening it returns you exactly where you left off, with every Window in place and your AI thread ready to continue.

Personal Spaces vs. shared Spaces#

Spaces inherit their visibility from the Dataspace they live in. A Space inside your personal Dataspace is yours alone. A Space inside a team Dataspace is shared — anyone with access to that Dataspace can open it, see what's there, and edit alongside you in real time.

When you create a Space, you choose where it lives. You can move a Space later by changing its parent.

When to make a new Space#

A new Space is cheap. Make one whenever you want a clean working surface for a distinct context:

• starting a new project or client engagement
• focusing on a single recurring weekly task (e.g., "Inbox triage")
• separating personal work from team work
• giving an Agent a dedicated room to operate in

You can always combine, rename, or archive Spaces later.

The Root Space#

Every organization has one shared Root Space that acts as a transparent shell over your top-level entities. It's the catch-all for things that don't yet belong to a specific project — a quick capture, a dropped file, a message you wanted to come back to.

You don't have to manage the Root Space. Things land there automatically when they don't have a more specific home.

Layouts#

Each Space has a layout mode you can switch in Space Settings:

The Canvas mode stores window positions in world coordinates so your arrangement stays exactly where you left it as you pan and zoom. Each user has their own camera position so you can explore the same shared Space from different angles.

Canvas mode also supports procedural backgrounds — seeded algorithmic visuals (topographic contour maps, fractal river networks) that tile seamlessly and zoom coherently with your workspace, giving you persistent visual landmarks to orient your window arrangement.

Tips#

• Use Cmd K to jump between Spaces from anywhere.
• Pin frequently-used Spaces to the sidebar so they're always one click away.
• Use Space Templates to spin up a preconfigured Space (with the right Apps, Windows, and Agents already set up) in one click. See Space Templates.