tela

Your tela wiki in the panel: full-text search with the matching passage, a question answered by meaning with its sources laid out, the pages that changed lately with your favourites first, the spaces, the decks and sheets, what links to a page, the mentions and replies that address you. A page opens in tela, or reads inside the panel with its headings, callouts, lists, code and tables drawn in pal's own tokens. A new page is a form whose body starts as whatever you had selected or copied. One bar item counts unread mentions and replies and stays hidden otherwise.

Signing in

Two settings, under Settings › Extensions › tela: the Address of the instance (https://telawiki.com, or your own) and a Token, a personal access token made under Settings, API Keys on tela (tela_pat_..., kept in the OS keychain). A read-scoped token lists, searches and researches; writes (a new page, a comment, marking notifications read) need write scope, and tela says so in the form when they do not have it. A token pinned to one space sees that space alone. Without either setting every palette is one hint row naming which; an expired token is one naming the renewal, with Enter on tela's API Keys page.

Everything goes to the instance's own API: the REST routes under /api/ for lists, pages, search and writes, and /api/mcp, the MCP endpoint tela's tela-mcp package proxies to, for research (the one call REST has no shape for). The MCP session is opened once per host run and again when the server forgets it.

What each palette does

Search tela sends what you type to tela's ranked full-text search (titles above bodies, a phrase in quotes, -word excluded), 250 ms after the last keystroke. Rows are pages, sectioned by space, with the breadcrumb and the matching passage; a page you can read only because its space is public is tagged. The pane (rest on a row, or ⌘I) is the page itself. Nothing found offers Ask tela.

Ask tela is tela's semantic, answer-oriented research: the pages that matter, assembled as a numbered grounding, with the cited sources, any known disagreements among them and a low-confidence flag. Type a question and Enter opens the answer as a view: the flags on top (amber "Low confidence" when nothing strongly relevant was found, red "Disagreements" with tela's note), the sources as numbered rows with the space, the heading path and when the page moved, and the selected source's excerpt from the grounding rendered under its row. ↓/j, ↑/k or a digit move the selection; Enter opens the source in tela, ⌘Enter reads the page in the panel, ⌘C copies its link, ⌘⇧C copies the whole grounding, ⌘⇧O opens the question on tela's Ask page (the LLM answer), + asks again with twice the sources when the answer was truncated, n opens a text field for the next question. Questions are remembered (twelve) and listed under the Ask row; ⌘⇧D forgets one. The research setting hides the palette; an instance with no embedder says so in a toast.

Pages at the root is four commands (New tela page, Search tela, Ask tela, Quick Notes: tela's per-user scratchpad), then your favourites, then what changed lately across every space you can see, sectioned by space, newest first, with who changed it. Pushed from Spaces it is one space's pages in tree order, sectioned by their top-level page. Every page row: Open in tela (Enter), Read in pal (⌘Enter: the page drawn in the panel), Copy link (⌘C), Outline (⌘⇧O, the headings), Backlinks (⌘B), Comment on page (⌘⇧M).

The Ask tela row takes the question as a typed argument: with the cursor on it the bar shows a Question field (Tab into it), Enter opens the answer view (⌘Enter takes the question to tela's Ask page instead); a pick without the value (pal run, a hotkey) asks for it in a form. The Ask tela palette still lists your recent questions.

Read in pal draws the page's markdown with the view tree (the SDK's md): headings by level, paragraphs, bullet, numbered and task lists (nested), > [!NOTE] callouts as tinted cards with a badge (Note blue, Tip green, Important violet, Warning amber, Caution red), quotes and tela's :::quote{cite} on a sunken well, code blocks mono on a sunken well (forty lines, then a count), tables as aligned columns (thirty rows), <details> as a titled section, :::tabs as headed sections, the links of a paragraph under it as ↗ label runs, an image as [image: alt]. The view's text node is one run, so bold, italic and code inside a paragraph are flattened to their words; a paragraph that is one bold or code run keeps the weight or the mono. Front matter is left out, and a leading # that repeats the title. Past 1200 nodes the view says the rest is in tela. From the view: Open in tela, Copy link, Backlinks, Outline, Comment, Copy markdown (⌘⇧C).

Spaces lists every space the token sees with its page count (one listing of every page, counted), the description, tags for public, personal and your default space, the member count and when it moved. Enter lists its pages, ⌘Enter opens it in tela, ⌘N starts a page in it.

New Page is one row per space (the default first); Enter opens the form: title, space (a select), body. The body starts as the front app's selected text, else the clipboard's text (under 20 KB); the description says so. The page opens in tela once created.

Comment on page anchors on a run of the page's text, as tela's comments do: the form's second field is that run, the first line of the page unless you change it. Backlinks lists the pages that link to the one you opened last (or the row ⌘B came from), with the linking passage.

Decks and Sheets are the pages flagged as such across every space, newest first (one tree listing per space, an hour); a deck's pane leads with its first slide as tela renders it, when the instance's deck renderer answers. Comments is the notifications that address you: mentions and replies to your comments, unread first, then the last twenty read ones; Enter marks one read and opens the page, ⌘Enter reads the page in pal, ⌘⇧R marks read, ⌘⇧A marks everything read.

The bar item tela/inbox counts unread mentions and replies as the badge, hidden at zero (tela's other notifications, sign-ups and Atlas runs among them, are not yours to answer); every 300 s and on show, wake and network. The popover is a view of its own: every one as a row (the kind's glyph, what happened, the comment's snippet, the time), with a cursor the arrows move and a click sets. Enter opens the focused comment in tela, m marks it read, a marks them all, o opens tela, p the Comments palette. Marked rows (⌘-click, ⇧-click, ⇧↓): Enter opens each, m marks them all read. In the palettes, marked pages, spaces and comments open and copy together, marked comments mark read together and marked recent questions are forgotten together.

What it does not do

• No daily or journal page: tela has none; Quick Notes is its scratchpad and stands in at the top of Pages.
• No editing of a page's body (no append): that is tela's MCP, not a launcher's job; the panel reads, opens, comments and creates.
• No per-space filter on Search: the REST search has no space parameter; sections by space do the sorting.
• The research answer is tela's grounding and sources, not an LLM's prose: that is tela's Ask page (⌘⇧O), which spends model credits.
• A comment's anchor is typed, not picked: the panel has no text selection over a page.

Settings, [extensions.tela]

The bar item is hidden at zero; show = "always" under [bar.items."tela/inbox"] keeps the glyph on the strip anyway, muted, with the same popover (docs/config.md).

For the tests, PAL_TELA_URL and PAL_TELA_TOKEN replace the two settings; host/test/extensions/tela-mock.ts is a mock instance the tests and the screenshot fixture (fixture.ts) run against.