Spaces
Spaces
Separate work, personal, client, and project memory, and understand how Wenlan resolves the active space.
At a glance
01
Spaces are memory buckets for different work contexts, such as origin, career, ideas, or a client project.
02
They reduce context bleed while keeping one local daemon and one Wenlan installation.
01
What a space is
A space is a named partition for memories, pages, and recall context. It is for separating work streams that should not automatically inform each other.
Use spaces when you switch between clients, personal projects, experiments, or repos with very different context.
02
Set the active space
The most explicit override is WENLAN_SPACE. It is useful when launching an agent for a specific context and you want every capture and recall to stay in that bucket.
The CLI also includes wenlan space commands for listing, adding, inspecting, and moving spaces.
Space commands
WENLAN_SPACE=career claude
wenlan space list
wenlan space add ideas --default
wenlan space show ideas
wenlan space move scratch career03
Configure defaults
Wenlan can read space configuration from ~/.wenlan/spaces.toml. Map directory prefixes to spaces when you want a repo or notes folder to select the same context every time.
Longest matching prefix wins. A top-level default applies when no mapping matches.
spaces.toml
[[mapping]]
prefix = "~/Repos/origin"
space = "origin"
[[mapping]]
prefix = "~/notes/career"
space = "career"
default = "personal"04
Resolver order
Wenlan resolves the active space through a priority chain. Explicit overrides win, then the shell environment, then spaces.toml, then the current git repo name, then topic fallback, then personal.
Use wenlan doctor when you are unsure which layer selected the current space. Doctor prints the resolver state so you can diagnose accidental context bleed.
Priority chain
1. explicit --arg override
2. WENLAN_SPACE environment variable
3. ~/.wenlan/spaces.toml cwd-prefix mapping
3.5 spaces.toml top-level default
4. current git repo basename
5. conversation topic fallback
6. personal hard default05
How recall behaves
Recall should start inside the active space so a client project does not accidentally pull personal notes or an unrelated repo history.
If you intentionally need cross-space context, move or recapture the durable fact into the right space rather than relying on accidental bleed.
06
What spaces are not
Spaces are not separate user accounts, encryption boundaries, or permission systems. They are product-level context separation inside your local Wenlan store.
For sensitive work, still treat the whole local machine and connected AI client as part of the privacy boundary.
Next
Knowledge Graph
Understand how Wenlan links people, projects, tools, observations, and relations so recall can recover context through more than text similarity.
Read next