The Focus Bar

The focus bar is a horizontal strip of artifact chips pinned to the top of the Spruce app. It shows up on every page (your views, by-type pages, the global tool pages, and the artifact editor), so your current work is always one click away without navigating back to your active view.

What shows up in it

Each project has a focus bar filter that decides which artifacts appear. The default filter combines:

• Artifacts assigned to you with status Todo, In Progress, or In Review.
• Artifacts linked to your current git branch (via the branch-artifact convention).
• Artifacts with a running terminal session (so anything you've already started working on stays pinned).

The three rules OR-combine, so anything matching any of them shows up.

Focus bar pinned above the active view with several artifact chips

Clicking a chip

Click any chip to open that artifact in the editor. The focus bar is the fastest way to context-switch between in-flight work: each artifact remembers what you last had open inside it (which tab in the tool panel was selected, the open file in Code, the active session, scroll position). You can be reviewing diffs on one artifact, writing a spec on another, and tailing logs in a third — clicking a chip drops you back into exactly where you left off.

The chip menu

Hover any chip and a menu pops up with everything you'd want to do with that artifact without opening it.

Focus bar chip with the artifact menu hovered open, showing the Git section, Sessions section, and Finish at the bottom

The menu is sectioned:

• Git (when the artifact has a branch): branch label + worktree chip at the top, then Start (or the smart-action button when branched), View changes rows (Uncommitted / Branch commits / All changes) with diff stats, and a Git submenu for the full action list (commit, push, stash, rebase, PR, merge). A Commits submenu lists the branch's commits with one-click open.
• Sessions: running sessions for this artifact, plus the Terminal submenu (start a new session, run an action). Empty state offers a New Terminal button.
• Finish: at the bottom, in red, when the artifact has a branch. Removes the worktree and (if clean) deletes the branch. See Branches and Worktrees.

There's also a search box at the top of the menu; type to filter across every item in every section.

The menu is the same one that appears on mini chips in view cards and table rows: same artifact, same menu, different surface.

Configuring the filter

Edit Settings → Per-project settings → Focus bar filter to change the rules. The filter supports:

• hasBranch: match artifacts linked to your active branch.
• isActive: match in-progress statuses.
• hasActiveSession: match artifacts with a running terminal session.
• fieldFilter: filter by a specific field (status, assignee, priority).
• templateFilter: restrict to a specific artifact type.

Rules combine with OR logic. See Per-Project Settings for the full schema.

Related

• Per-Project Settings — the focus bar filter config.
• The Sidebar — the other always-visible nav element.
• Branches and Worktrees — the branch-artifact link powers hasBranch.