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Download

Pond is in closed beta, so there is no public download yet. To ask for access, contact the person who told you about Pond. A beta build is a .dmg for Macs with Apple silicon: open it and drag Pond into Applications. Once Pond ships, it will be a normal macOS app on pond.codes.

First launch

1. A privacy screen comes first. Crash reports start ticked and anonymous usage starts unticked. See Security and privacy.
2. Meanwhile Pond looks once, read only, for projects you already have. It reads Orca's repo list (only if Orca is installed) and the git folders of Claude Code sessions from the last 30 days. It reads no message text.
3. The sidebar asks Which projects?, or Bring your Orca projects when Orca has repos. All rows are ticked, and each repo's existing worktrees come with it. Click a row to untick it. Press Add (Return) or Skip (Esc). Skip writes nothing. Pond imports only each project's name and path. Moving from Orca: see Coming from Orca.

There is no tour. The first blob you ever get shows its card for 4 seconds with "Click to open. Drag to move."

Your first agent

• In the sidebar, use New task on a project and describe the task. Pond makes a worktree and starts the agent in it. See Tasks.
• Or, from a terminal inside a repo, run pond new "fix the login bug". See the CLI reference.

A blob appears. When it shows Needs you, click it or use the keyboard cycle below.

The stage

• Click a blob and its terminal opens large in the middle of the screen. You type straight into it.

• A second click adds a tile. Two tiles are two columns. Three are a main tile plus a stack, or three columns on a wide display. Four are a 2x2 grid. A fifth click replaces the tile you used least recently.

• Click the blob of an open tile, or press Cmd-W, to send it back into its blob. Pressing Esc twice within 0.4 seconds does the same. The first Esc still reaches the terminal.

• Cmd-1 to Cmd-4 focus a tile by its position.

• Drag one tile's header onto another to swap them.

• The pin in a tile's header takes it out of the stage. It then floats where it is.

• Tiles float over other apps. Pond never resizes another app's windows.

• Each display has its own stage. Pond remembers your tiles across a relaunch.

• Cmd-F in a focused tile finds text, Cmd-D splits it into two panes, and you can drop files and screenshots on it. See Terminal tiles.

The keyboard cycle

Press Ctrl-Option-K from any app. You can record another key in Settings. Pond takes the keyboard briefly and puts a ring on the first blob, with its card.

Key	Does
K, Tab, Right, Down	Next blob
Shift-K, Shift-Tab, Left, Up	Previous blob
Return	Open the focused blob
Esc	Leave the cycle and give the keyboard back

The cycle also ends after 4 seconds without a key. The order is: needs you (oldest question first), error, working, done, idle. A friend's guest blob comes after the agents that are asking.

Settings worth knowing

• Settings › General has Install pond command.
• Settings › Privacy has the two report switches.
• Settings › Help has Export diagnostics and the update check.
• Settings › Friends and Settings › Computer use are both off until you turn them on.