Focus Mode: Clearing the Screen to Read

Some answers are short. Others are a twenty-paragraph research report with citations, and you want to actually read them.

Sapience puts a lot on screen to help you navigate — the sidebar with your agents, files, projects and history down the left, and a description of the agent you're talking to across the top. All of it earns its place when you're moving around. None of it helps when you've asked a hard question and the reply is long.

Focus Mode is one click that gets it out of the way. The sidebar shrinks to a narrow strip of icons and the agent description disappears, handing the answer the full width of your window. Click it again and everything comes back.

Look at the top of any chat. Next to the agent's name you'll see About and, beside it, Focus Mode.

That's the whole control. There's nothing to set up and nothing to remember.

Focus Mode is deliberately narrow about what it hides. It takes away the two things that are pure navigation and leaves everything you actually use while reading.

The sidebar isn't gone — it's still there as a strip of icons down the left edge. Click any of them and you get to the same places, so you can still jump to a file or another chat without leaving Focus Mode.

This is the part worth knowing, because it's the thing people usually get wrong about modes: Focus Mode belongs to the conversation you switched it on in.

Open a different chat, or go off to Files or Projects, and you're back to the normal layout automatically. You never arrive somewhere else in Sapience wondering why your sidebar has vanished, and you never have to remember to switch it off.

So it's safe to use casually. Turn it on for one long answer, walk away, and it tidies up after itself.

Focus Mode is available in chat on web and desktop.

The Quick Chat window on desktop — the small pop-up chat you open with a keyboard shortcut — already opens in this layout by design, since it exists to be read rather than navigated. As of this release that window also keeps its conversation bar and header buttons, matching what you see everywhere else.

Focus Mode is a desktop-and-web layout feature; the mobile apps have their own layout and are unaffected.

Focus Mode is a single link in the chat header that collapses the sidebar and hides the agent description together, giving a long answer the whole window. Click it again — it now reads Full UI Mode — to bring both back. It applies only to the conversation you switched it on in and clears itself the moment you go elsewhere, so it's safe to use without thinking about it.