Get started with Lemonade

Quick Start

Lemonade is an ADE — an Agentic Development Environment. It runs multiple AI coding agents side by side in one window, on one project folder. Here is the five minute version.

Installation

Windows

Lemonade ships as an NSIS installer. It installs for the current user only, so it never asks for administrator rights, and the WebView2 runtime is bundled in the installer rather than downloaded. Windows may show a SmartScreen prompt on first run — click More info → Run anyway.

Download for Windows

macOS

Download the universal DMG — one build covering both Apple Silicon and Intel. Mount it, drag Lemonade to Applications, then open it. The build is signed and notarized by Apple.

Download for macOS

Linux

There is no Linux build today.

Activation

Lemonade is a $5 one-time purchase. There is no account, no login, no subscription and no sync. Your key arrives by email after checkout and looks like LMNDE-XXXXXXXX-….

Paste it into the License step of the first-run wizard, or into the activation box on the welcome screen. Activation registers the machine under a readable device name so you can tell your devices apart.

• 3 activations — enough for a desktop, a work machine and a laptop.
• 7-day offline grace — Lemonade keeps working fully with no network at all. The grace window is only ever used for an outage, never for a genuine refusal, so a license server having a bad day is not mistaken for a bad key.
• Hardware changes are covered — a separate grace window means upgrading your machine or OS while offline does not lock you out. It re-verifies on the next successful check.
• All future updates included — forever, with no tiers and no feature gates.

Legacy keys issued through Gumroad before the move to Polar still activate normally.

Workspaces

A workspace is one project folder plus everything you have open against it. Workspaces are the tabs along the titlebar.

• One folder per workspace — every cell in it is scoped to that directory.
• Tabs — drag to reorder, double-click to rename, right-click for a context menu. Colours cycle through eight presets so no two neighbours match.
• Tabs come back after a restart — in the same order, with their names, colours and folders. A restored tab opens on the launcher, so you start the agents again; previous conversations are not resumed. Closing a tab removes it for good.
• Sessions stay alive when you switch away. The terminal keeps buffering in the background with nothing attached to it, and switching back restores the full snapshot.
• Attention — if a background agent hits a yes/no prompt, its tab pulses amber. It only ever flags inactive tabs, and clears the moment you switch to it.
• Detach a workspace into its own window with Open in New Window and drag it to a second monitor. The running sessions come with it.
• Broadcast to All — right-click a tab to type one message and send it to every agent in that workspace.

The Grid

Inside a workspace is a grid of up to 16 cells, in 16 layouts. Cells drag to reorder, swap places, and resize freely on the layouts that allow it.

Layout sizes

Cell Types

Lemonade does not put each feature on its own screen. Every feature is a cell you drop into the grid, so they compose: four agents, a task board and a browser in one 6-up layout is an ordinary thing to have open.

• Terminal — the default. A real PTY running an agent CLI or a plain shell.
• Kanban — the project's task board, read from kanban.json.
• Files — the editor, with a browser-style tab strip.
• Browser — an embedded web view with tabs and volume control.

Every cell type survives a workspace switch.

Terminal Cells

Each terminal is a full PTY session, not a log view. Agents are fully interactive: they read your filesystem, write code, run tests and answer prompts, exactly as they would in your own terminal.

• Shell detection — on Windows: pwsh, then PowerShell 5, cmd, Git Bash, WSL. On macOS it respects $SHELL across zsh, bash, fish and nushell.
• Clean environment — if you launch Lemonade from inside an AI coding session, its terminals would otherwise inherit that session's marker variables and an embedded CLI would think it was a nested child, dropping to colourless output. Lemonade strips those markers before every spawn, so its terminals are always first-class.
• Rename a cell from its tab label. Click, type, done.
• Copy and paste with Ctrl+C/V or Ctrl+Shift+C/V, plus right-click paste.

Kanban Board

Add a Kanban cell and it reads kanban.json from the root of your working directory. One board per folder. The board is a project artifact you would commit next to the code, not app state hidden away in a config folder. Point two cells at the same folder and you get two live views of one board.

The board

Four fixed columns: Backlog → In Progress → Review → Done. They are deliberately not configurable, because the columns are a contract between you and the agents working the board. A card written with an invented status is moved back to Backlog rather than vanishing.

• Drag and drop — the card follows your cursor, columns auto-scroll at the edges, and Escape cancels a pick-up part way.
• Keyboard — Ctrl+arrows move a focused card between and within columns.
• Cards open in a panel scoped to the cell, with room for a real description. Editing happens in place so the board does not shift under you.
• Adding a card opens the same panel, and nothing is written to disk until you confirm — so cancelling leaves the file untouched.
• Priority is low, medium, high or urgent. It colours the card and can be hidden in Settings → Kanban. It does not reorder anything: the order in the column is the order in the file.
• Save warnings — if a write stops reaching disk, because the folder is read-only or gone, the cell header says so immediately rather than accepting edits that only look saved.

Working the board with agents

This is the point of it. The board is a file, and files are what agents are already good at.

Tell Claude Code or Codex to work the board and it takes cards in order from Backlog, moves each to In Progress before starting, does the work, then moves it to Done — writing the file at each step so you watch the cards move while it works. A card it cannot finish stays where it is with the reason appended, so nothing is ever marked done that was not done.

That behaviour comes from the Kanban skill. Download it from Settings → Kanban as a standard skills/kanban/SKILL.md folder, ready to drop into ~/.claude, ~/.codex or ~/.agents, or into a project's own .claude / .codex. Any agent that supports skills can use it.

Lemonade watches the file, so a card an agent moves — or a board that arrives in a git pull — shows up in the open cell within a moment.

The file

Small, readable and hand-editable. Defaults are left out rather than written, so a normal card is three keys. Commit it, diff it, or turn on Git-ignore the board in Settings → Kanban to keep boards local.

Files & Editor

A file tree scoped to the workspace folder, dockable left or right, resizable by dragging, toggled with Ctrl + B. Opening a file creates an editor cell in the grid; closing the last tab closes the cell.

Correct while agents are writing

This is the part that matters in an agentic session, because something else is editing these files while you look at them.

The conflict banner offers Keep my version or Reload from disk, and both confirm first, because either one destroys somebody's work. There is no auto-save, on purpose: auto-save plus agent writes is a clobber machine. Save with Ctrl + S.

Editing

• Syntax highlighting for around sixty languages, with colours that follow your theme and bracket pairs coloured by depth. Each grammar loads the first time you open a file of that kind.
• Word wrap on Alt + Z. The shortcut skips terminals, so an agent's own Alt+Z is never stolen.
• Image, video and audio preview, and an icon on every file for its type.
• Right-click the tree for new file, new folder, rename, duplicate and delete. An existing destination is always refused, never overwritten. Right-click an .html file and choose View in Browser to open it in your default browser.
• The explorer can be switched off entirely in Settings → Preferences, in which case Ctrl + B goes to your terminal instead.
• Drag a file or folder onto a terminal and its full path is typed at that prompt, quoted only when it needs to be, with a trailing space so you can keep typing. Files dropped from your desktop behave the same way.
• Dotfiles and heavy folders like node_modules are hidden by default and one toggle away.
• Workspaces remember which files were open and which folders were expanded. Contents are always re-read from disk, never restored stale.

Browser Cells

A real embedded browser in a grid cell.

• Tabs per cell, with inactive tabs parked off screen so audio and video keep playing.
• Per-cell volume control.
• Snip — drag a region and it lands on your clipboard as a PNG.
• It presents itself as an ordinary browser, so Google sign-in works.

Agents

Lemonade runs any CLI-based coding agent. Twenty presets ship in the picker, each knowing its own command, its brand colour, how long to wait before typing into a fresh shell, and its skip-permissions flag where one exists.

Plus the Browser and Kanban cells, which are picked the same way.

Custom agents

Any shell command works as an agent. Point a Custom cell at my-cli --project ., npx my-ai-tool or python -m my_agent and save it as a preset.

Model selection

Claude, Gemini, Grok, Aider and Droid carry model catalogues, and your choice is passed to the CLI as a flag at launch. The rest discover their own models at runtime, so Lemonade does not second-guess them.

Dangerous mode

A global toggle plus per-agent overrides, applying each agent's own skip-permissions flag so it will not stop to ask. Seven of the presets support one.

The Vault

Agentic development leaks API keys in ways ordinary development does not. A key pasted into a prompt is in your transcript and on a provider's servers. A key in a .env file is one eager commit from being public. A key printed to a terminal is in your scrollback and your screen recording.

The Vault takes them out of circulation. Add a key once in Settings → Vault with the environment variable your agents expect, and every agent you launch afterwards receives it at startup.

• Encrypted locally with AES-256-GCM. The encryption key lives in Windows Credential Manager or the macOS Keychain, behind your login. No account, nothing uploaded.
• Never shown again — no part of the app can read a stored value back to the screen. One click copies a key to your clipboard, and the clipboard clears itself after 30 seconds.
• Masked in output — if a stored key ever appears in what an agent prints, it is masked before it reaches your screen.
• Optional 6-digit PIN covering adding, editing, copying and deleting. It does not gate injection, so agents already running keep working and an unattended session never breaks because you locked the panel.

Running sessions keep the environment they started with; key changes apply to the next agent you launch.

Usage Meters

The status bar can show how much of your plan you have used.

• Claude — read from the same endpoint the Claude CLI's own usage panel uses, authenticated with the token Claude Code already stores locally. You get the real 5-hour and 7-day figures with their reset times.
• Codex — read entirely offline from the rate-limit snapshot the Codex CLI writes into its own session logs. No network call at all.

These two are the only agents that expose readable usage, so they are the only two offered. Choose your poll interval and whether to display used or remaining. If a fetch fails, the last value is kept and marked stale — a number is never invented.

Alongside them the status bar can show CPU and RAM gauges, at an interval you choose.

Themes & Appearance

• 19 built-in themes — 11 dark and 8 light, including Lemonade, Dracula, Tokyo Night, Catppuccin, Nord, Gruvbox, Rosé Pine, Monokai Pro, One Dark and their light counterparts.
• Make your own — pick any background and any accent colour and the whole palette is worked out for you: surfaces, text, borders and the terminal, contrast-checked as you go. Your themes sit alongside the built-in ones and stay editable.
• Typography — terminal font size, app font size, seven monospace families, line height, cursor style and blink, terminal opacity.
• Four languages — English, French, Spanish and German, in Settings → Appearance.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Ctrl is ⌘ on macOS.

Settings

Settings opens as an overlay with these tabs.

• Agents — hide presets you never use, pre-fill how many of each to launch, save custom commands, and set dangerous mode globally or per agent.
• Kanban — show or hide the priority chip, git-ignore the board, and download the Kanban skill.
• Vault — add, rotate and delete keys, and set or change the PIN.
• Appearance — language, text size, theme, the theme creator, fonts, cursor and terminal opacity.
• Shortcuts — the reference list.
• Preferences — welcome tab on startup, status bar, file explorer side (or off), the Browser start page and Snip toggle, the CPU and RAM gauges, and usage meters.
• Updates — check now, and install.
• About — version, license and the full changelog.

Updates

Lemonade checks for updates shortly after launch, then once an hour, and again whenever you come back to the app. When one is available the status bar says so.

Choosing Later stops it nagging about that version, but a newer release still gets through. You are never force-updated. Every release is signed with minisign and verified before installing, and release notes appear in the app the first time you open a new version.

Troubleshooting

An agent will not start

Lemonade does not install agents. Make sure the CLI is installed and on your PATH — open an ordinary terminal and run it by name. If it works there and not in Lemonade, check the working directory is one the agent can read.

License activation fails

Activation needs a one-time online check, so confirm you have a connection. If the message mentions an activation limit you have used all three, and you will need to deactivate elsewhere or contact support. A message about the server being unreachable is an outage, not a bad key — try again shortly.

My API key showed up in the terminal

The Vault masks stored values in terminal output, but only in the terminal stream. A subprocess of an agent that writes elsewhere, or a key that is not stored in the Vault, is not covered. Values must be at least eight plain ASCII characters to be masked.

The board is not saving

The Kanban cell header shows a warning when writes stop reaching disk. Usually the folder is read-only, has been deleted, or is on a drive that is no longer mounted.

High memory usage

Each terminal cell is a full PTY session, and the agents running inside them have their own footprint. Sixteen agents at once is a lot of processes — close the ones you are not using.

Keyboard focus does not return after alt-tab

Lemonade watches for this and restores focus to the terminal you last used. If it persists, click once in the cell you want.