The Studio in five minutes

What you'll learn

The Quickstart shows the loop from the command line. This tutorial shows the same instance from the other side: the Studio, the web surface your workspace serves. You will touch all three shapes (the sentence, the ledger, the address) in one short pass. Read what is there, write by completing a sentence, and share a thread with confidence because you looked at it as a guest first.

You need a running workspace. If you followed the Quickstart, you have one:

spl serve

Then open your workspace in a browser. Local workspaces serve the Studio at their own origin, and a hosted workspace serves it at your workspace URL.

1. Read a ledger

Open any thread with something on it: a task, a conversation, a shared space. Down the left are your places (your call, everything, files). Each is a ledger over what the whole instance holds. Open one and you are reading rows. Each row is folded from records, and a count that might not be the whole set prints with a +, so you always know whether you are seeing everything.

Inside a thread, the chips across the top (invites, files, and any your venture declares) are the thread's own ledgers. Click one and it takes the stage. Notice the row verbs: an invite row can be revoked, a file row can be opened. A ledger does not just show data. It shows what you can do to each row, and only offers a verb it can actually satisfy.

2. Write by completing a sentence

You will not find a form. To do anything, you complete a sentence. In the composer at the foot of a thread, type /:

/

The surface offers the acts you can perform here. Pick share (or invite, on a venture), and it lifts a sentence with holes:

invite  @who?  as  a guest  for  how long?  to  [[ this thread ]]

Fill the holes. @ offers people, for understands "a week" or "3 days", and [[ names threads. As you fill them, the line under the sentence tells you in plain words exactly what the act will do:

makes a guest link: they read everything on this thread, no account, for a week, nobody else changes

Nothing is written until you press the verb. This is the one and only write path in the Studio. Every change is a sentence you can reach the same way.

3. Look before you share

Before you hand out that link, see the thread the way the guest will. Choose see it as a guest at the top of the thread. The surface folds to exactly what a guest link discloses: only the records that link admits, in the guest's own read-only view. A banner reminds you that you are looking, not editing.

This is your chance to catch a leak before it happens. If the thread carries something you did not mean to share, a note, a number, another person's row, you see it here as they would, instead of finding out after you have sent the link. Press stop to return to your own view.

The preview is faithful, not a mock. It shows the guest's real view over a copy of your own records folded to just what a guest can see, so what you see is genuinely what they get.

4. Read the address, and share it

Look at the bar at the bottom. It is not a breadcrumb. It is the address, and its value is real:

⌂ the night  ›  invites   as guest

It names where you are standing, what you have open, which fold is on the stage, and, while you preview, whose eyes you are borrowing.

Because the address is a value, it is what you cite and what you share. Copy it and a teammate lands exactly where you are. And when you share with a stranger, the Studio mints a different address on purpose, the public link, not the address of the room you stand in, so you can never hand out the wrong door by accident.

What just happened

You used all three shapes in one lap of the loop:

That is the whole surface. There is no fourth kind of screen. Every other thing you will do in the Studio, running an agent, reading a decision, managing a venture, is the same three shapes over different folds.

Where to go next

• The three shapes: the concept in full.
• Principals and grants: exactly what a guest link admits.
• Your first decision: a sentence that asks a person to decide.