VS Code Agents Window

In one line

The Agents window is a dedicated VS Code window where chat is the primary interface, not the editor.

It works across all your workspaces from one window, so you can assign high-level tasks and track many agents at once.

🎯 The Chat view is bound to the one folder you have open. The Agents window is bound to nothing — it sees every workspace. ⚠️ Preview, shipped in VS Code 1.120. Both surfaces share the same sessions, settings, and keybindings.

How to open it

Four entry points, all landing on the same window alongside your main editor.

🖱️ The Open in Agents button in the VS Code title bar.
⌨️ Chat: Open Agents window from the Command Palette.
💻 code --agents from the terminal.
🌐 insiders.vscode.dev/agents ↗ to drive sessions from any device.

code --agents          # open the Agents window directly

💡 Hid the title-bar button by accident? Right-click it and pick Hide ‘Open in Agents’ — the Command Palette and CLI still work.

The five panels

The window is one fixed layout, and every panel follows whichever session has focus.

Panel	What it holds
📋 Sessions list	Every session, grouped by workspace, plus workspace-less Chats
🔧 Customizations	Agents, skills, instructions, hooks, MCP servers, plugins
💬 Chat area	The active session’s conversation and prompt box
🔀 Changes	Branch / uncommitted / all / last-turn diffs, plus Git actions
📁 Files	The session’s worktree — all files, not just the ones touched

📝 Quick chats live in the Chats group and belong to no workspace, so Files and Changes disappear while one is active.

Sessions and isolation

Each session gets an isolated git worktree, so parallel tasks never fight over the same files.

🌿 Worktree per session: dedicated branch, independent working tree.
🧩 Harness per session: pick Copilot, Claude, or Codex when you create it.
🎛️ Configure at start: agent, language model, permission level, and isolation mode.
🔭 Active session drives everything: Files, Changes, Terminal, Tasks, and the integrated browser all follow focus. Each session even keeps its own browser tabs and page state.

🔑 Sessions are not exclusive to this window — the same ones show up in your main VS Code window. See harness and code isolation ↗.

Working in parallel

Starting a second agent shouldn’t cost you the first one’s context.

Shortcut	Action
`Alt`+`Enter`	Submit and run in the background, staying where you are
`⌘N` / `Ctrl+N`	New session
`⌘K ⌘N` / `Ctrl+K Ctrl+N`	New quick chat
`⌘1`–`⌘9` / `Ctrl+1`–`Ctrl+9`	Focus a session by grid position
`⌘K ⌘W` / `Ctrl+K Ctrl+W`	Close all open sessions

Open sessions side by side via Open to the Side, dragging one out of the list, or Alt-clicking. Pin a view so selecting another doesn’t replace it.

💡 Alt+Enter is the real unlock. Fire off a long task, keep reading the session you were already in.

★ Killer use case

Fanning out across repositories is what this window exists for.

Group the sessions list by workspace, then use New Session from Pull Request to open a session that already carries a PR’s diff and comments as context, on a worktree tracking that branch. Review, push more commits, and Sync Changes back to the same PR.

Add a per-session Task that runs on worktree creation, so a fresh worktree installs dependencies before you ever look at it.

🎯 One window, N repositories, N agents. You stop opening a VS Code window per project just to check on something.

Where it fits

The same agent, framed differently depending on where you direct it from.

Surface	Scope	Best for
🪟 Agents window	Every workspace at once	Parallel orchestration across projects
💬 Chat view	The folder you have open	Staying close to the code you’re editing
🖥️ Copilot App	Its own desktop app	GitHub-native triage through to merge
⌨️ Copilot CLI	Terminal	Scripting and CI

⚠️ Preview limitations: no multi-root sessions, Copilot Cloud sessions need a GitHub-backed repo, the agents dropdown has no plan agent (use /plan), and extensions must be opted in via extensions.supportAgentsWindow. 💡 Compare with Copilot App ↗ and Copilot Chat ↗.