The Conversation screen
Understand what the Conversation screen is, why it is not the Canvas conversation card seen from another angle, and what is still missing for the four screens to be truly separate.
The Conversation screen is where you talk to an assistant and nothing else. There is no board, no card, no terminal: the whole screen is one conversation, with the history above and the composer below. It is the surface designed for people who are starting out, because it asks for no product jargon to be used.
Elyra has four screens — Canvas, Conversation, Terminal and Browser — and none of them is “the main one”. The product rule is that all four receive the same weight of investment.
A Conversation screen conversation is not a Canvas card
This is the most important distinction on this page, and its answer changed over the course of the project.
The old model treated the four screens as lenses over the same sessions: the same conversation became a card on the Canvas, a full screen in Conversation, and an item in a list. The product decision of 22 August 2026 retired that model. The recorded choice is that each screen be a place of its own, and that you choose where to work without one view opening inside another:
- Terminal shows terminal; Conversation shows conversation; Browser shows the preview; Canvas shows the cards.
- A conversation opened on the Canvas is not the same thing seen on the Conversation screen, and a Canvas terminal does not appear on the Terminal screen.
- Sessions stay alive in the application’s main process: switching screens does not interrupt what was running. What no longer exists is the idea that the four screens are angles of the same session.
In practice, what is already in the code is the surface identity: each conversation has its own pane key, and the two surfaces draw the same conversation component in different frames — the Conversation screen with the conversation layout, the Canvas card with the card layout. Switching screens does not turn the tab into a card, nor the card into a tab.
⚠️ Current limit. The full separation between the screens is not complete yet: the workbench stays mounted and visible underneath every screen, so what occupies the screen may not be what the screen promises. Do not count on “each screen showing only its own content” as guaranteed behaviour, and do not treat the separation of the four screens as a delivered feature.
What the screen brings together
Conversation is where the features that depend on a live conversation session live:
| Feature | Where it is explained |
|---|---|
| Choosing the agent and understanding what each provider can do | Agents and providers |
| Writing, sending and queueing messages during a turn | Sending messages |
| Attaching a file, an image, a pasted screenshot or a dropped file | Attachments in the conversation |
| Finding and resuming earlier conversations | Conversation history |
| Exporting the history as JSON or Markdown | Exporting the history |
What is true on any screen
Regardless of the screen separation, two things always hold, and they are why a conversation survives layout changes:
- The session lives in the main process. Closing the card, minimising, maximising, switching screens or switching workspaces does not bring down what the agent was doing.
- The draft is preserved. Text you wrote and did not send is not lost by leaving the screen.
Limits worth knowing now
- The Conversation screen does not replace the Terminal. A provider with no integrated conversation on the host in use remains reachable through the Terminal; Conversation does not invent an alternative path for it.