Get Started

Your First Five Minutes

A guided tour of the workbench layout, the Command Palette, and the fastest way to get from a blank window to a running project.

The layout at a glance

Gunamaya's window is divided into a handful of regions that stay consistent no matter what you're working on:

Activity Bar

The narrow strip on the far left. Each icon switches which panel shows in the side bar — Explorer, Search, Source Control, Run and Debug, Extensions, and Gunamaya AI.

Side Bar

The panel next to the Activity Bar. Its contents change with whichever Activity Bar icon is selected — most often the file Explorer.

Editor Groups

The large central area where files open as tabs. Split it vertically or horizontally to view multiple files side by side.

Panel

The area below the editor, home to the integrated Terminal, Problems list, Output logs, and Debug Console.

Secondary Side Bar

A second side bar on the right, where Gunamaya AI lives by default so your AI conversation stays visible alongside your code.

Status Bar

The thin strip along the bottom — branch name, language mode, line/column position, and any background task progress.

The Command Palette is the fastest way to do anything

Press Ctrl + Shift + P (Cmd + Shift + P on macOS) from anywhere and type what you want to do. Every command in Gunamaya — opening a settings page, changing a theme, running a task, toggling word wrap — is reachable this way, usually faster than hunting through a menu.

A few worth memorizing early:

Command	Windows / Linux	macOS
Command Palette	`Ctrl`+`Shift`+`P`	`Cmd`+`Shift`+`P`
Quick Open (go to file)	`Ctrl`+`P`	`Cmd`+`P`
Toggle integrated terminal	`Ctrl`+`	`Ctrl`+`
Open Gunamaya AI	`Ctrl`+`Alt`+`I`	`Cmd`+`Ctrl`+`I`
Open Settings	`Ctrl`+`,`	`Cmd`+`,`

You can see and change every one of these in Keyboard Shortcuts (Ctrl + K Ctrl + S) — see Keyboard Shortcuts for the full picture.

From blank window to running project

1

Open a folder, not a file

Gunamaya is workspace-oriented. Use File → Open Folder… to open your whole project rather than individual files — this is what unlocks the Explorer tree, Search-across-files, Source Control, and correct IntelliSense.

2

Let the editor find your files

Press Ctrl + P and start typing a filename. Quick Open fuzzy-matches across your whole workspace, so pkgjson will find package.json just fine.

3

Open a terminal

Press Ctrl + ` for an integrated terminal rooted at your workspace folder. Run your install and build commands right there — see Terminal.

4

Bring in Gunamaya AI

Open the AI panel and ask a question about the codebase you just opened — Gunamaya AI reads your files for context automatically. See Gunamaya AI Overview.

5

Check your work live

If you're building something with a UI, open the Integrated Browser in a split pane next to your code and point it at your local dev server.

Zen Mode, when you need to focus

Press Ctrl + K Z to hide every panel except the editor itself. Press Esc twice to bring everything back.