Arranging Your Work

Last updated: September 2026

Kepler has one interface rather than a set of views, so you shape it instead of switching away from it. Three controls do most of the work: the arrangement, the grouping, and the filters. Each segment remembers its own.

This page assumes you know what’s on screen; see The Kepler Interface for that.

Two layouts

The View control decides how Kepler draws the list.

List is the default, and each segment remembers its own choice across restarts — Todo can stay a list while Tasks in progress stays a board. Both layouts respect the grouping and filters below.

Columns draws the sections of the current grouping as a horizontal board, so what the columns are is up to the Group control. Grouped by Progress, the columns are the lifecycle stages: Exploration, In Development, In Review, and Done. They stay put as work moves between them rather than appearing and vanishing under the pointer, and an empty one reads Nothing here. Archived is the exception: it appears only when something is filed there. On every other grouping, Kepler doesn’t draw a section with nothing in it.

Group

The Group dropdown reorganizes the list.

The available groupings differ by segment.

Inbox

Inbox is the default on Tasks in progress, and it is viewer-relative: it sorts by what each task is asking of you, not by where the work has got to. It reads top-down from what needs you toward what’s filed away.

A session stays marked unseen until you actually look at it, so a turn that finished while you were elsewhere doesn’t quietly clear itself.

Inbox is one of two axes where a task can appear twice: a task that is both unread and blocked on you is listed under Unread and Needs attention, because each bucket is a complete answer to its own question and leaving it out of either would make that list lie. Running is exclusive — a task already at the top doesn’t need a second row saying it’s busy too. So is Done, which stands in for the time bucket a task would otherwise get.

The 24-hour window is fixed rather than a setting: the axis is meant to be a quick daily sweep, not a tunable report.

The other axes

Progress and Activity are two different questions about the same tasks. Progress is how far the work has got: Exploration, In Development, In Review, Done, Archived. Activity is what the task’s agent sessions are doing right now, in the sessions’ own words: Waiting, Running, Ready, Spawning, Unread, Idle, Error, Disconnected, and Terminated. Grouping by Activity also adds No sessions for a task nobody has started, then Done, and Archived last. Group by Progress to see the shape of the pipeline; group by Activity to see what needs a person.

Repository is the other axis that can list a task twice: a task bound to worktrees in several repositories appears under each of them, because the axis answers “what’s happening in this repository” one repository at a time.

Tasks in progress has no Status grouping, because a task’s status is its progress stage, a second axis under another name.

On Todo, Needs my attention is the viewer-relative axis: what each item is asking of you right now — Changes requested, Needs my review, Re-review, Comments — with No action needed last, where it can’t push a real obligation below the fold. It’s an axis rather than a pinned section so it obeys the same rules as every other grouping: one bucket per state, collapsible headers, and no row shown twice.

Items with no repository or provider collect under No repository and No provider. A pull request whose provider didn’t say who authored it groups under Unattributed; an issue, which has no author-or-reviewer axis at all, groups under Not applicable.

Fold a section

Every group header is a fold toggle, with the section’s count beside its name.

Folding one unmounts its rows, so a long Done list stops costing anything to keep around. Archived starts folded when you group by Activity or Inbox, since it’s the section that work is filed into. Folds last only for the current run; Kepler doesn’t write them to disk.

Filter

The Filter menu holds one flyout per facet.

Kepler hides facets with nothing to offer, so a single-repo setup won’t show a Repository facet at all.

Issue type, Label, and Project carry your provider’s own vocabulary (a Jira issue type, your team’s tags, a board name), not a Kepler-side translation of them.

Linked work filters by whether an item is connected to work on the other side: Has a task / No task yet in Todo, and Has a PR or issue / No PR or issue in Tasks in progress.

Values within one facet combine as a union. Ticking GitHub and GitLab under Provider shows items from either, not items that are somehow both. A facet with nothing ticked reads Any and narrows nothing. The Search filters… box finds a facet value without scrolling, and the menu reports {count} of {total} as you narrow.

External sessions stay listed under a filter that has no way to answer for them, rather than vanishing because a facet couldn’t classify them.

Once a search or a filter is narrowing the list, the strip reports the match as {count} of {total} and offers Clear filters, which drops the search text and the facets together. Refresh re-fetches the current segment from your providers.

Search

The search box matches on title, reference, or repository: Search title, ref, or repo….

Click the X button to clear the search and return to the full list.

What Kepler remembers

Each segment remembers its own search, grouping, and filters, since they differ enough that sharing them would be meaningless. Kepler restores the segment you left along with its view. Kepler also remembers which panels were open, but only for the length of a run, so a round trip to the other segment doesn’t cost you the panel you were reading. A relaunch still opens on a plain list rather than a stale panel.

Archive, restore, and clean up in bulk

Archive task files a task away. It leaves the live buckets for Archived, its rows and sessions survive, and Kepler stops only the agents whose checkout is about to disappear.

The confirmation offers the same two cascades the delete does: Also delete worktrees and Also delete branches. This way, finishing with a task doesn’t have to mean deleting it to clean it off the disk. Archiving outranks everything else, so a task you filed away can’t climb back into a live section because a shell is still open on it.

Restoring a task takes an extra step: filter first. An archived task’s row doesn’t offer Restore task while it’s mixed in with everything else. Filter Activity to Archived (see Filter above), and the ⋮ menu on a row in that filtered list swaps Archive task for Restore task, which puts it straight back. Restore task is also on the task page’s own header as soon as the task is archived, with no filtering needed.

For more than one at a time, every section header on Tasks in progress carries a quiet Select. Press it, and that corner of the header becomes a bar: a select-all box, {count} selected, and the batch verbs. The section’s rows also grow checkboxes. One section selects at a time, and while you’re selecting, a click ticks a row rather than opening its panel.

Both Archive and Delete confirm, and both offer Also delete worktrees and Also delete branches. Kepler remembers what you ticked, per dialog, so a habit doesn’t have to be re-entered every time. The batch confirmation doesn’t list what each individual checkout would lose; open a task’s own ⋮ for that.