Keeping Granular fast

If Granular starts to feel slow, restart it, close sessions you aren't using, and start big jobs in a fresh session. Your files and your session history are kept.

Why Granular slows down

Granular keeps every open session ready to go, even the ones you can't see. Each session has its own chat and its own terminal (a text window where commands run), and they stay ready in the background so you can switch to any one instantly.

That's convenient with a handful of sessions. With dozens open across several projects, or after Granular has been open for days, all that background work adds up. Clicks, opening Settings or even switching to dark mode can take a second or two, especially while an agent is busy writing a reply.

Very long chats add to it too. A session that has been going for weeks holds every message it has ever shown.

None of this harms your work. It only makes the app slower to respond.

What Granular already does for you

• Terminals start only when needed. After you open Granular, a chat's terminal starts the first time you open that chat, not before.
• Idle terminals rest. A chat's main terminal closes itself after 10 minutes with nothing to do, and starts again on the next command, in the same folder. It never closes while something is running in it. See Terminal.
• Preview tabs pause. Only the Preview tab you're looking at and the two you used last keep a live page. Others pause until you click them. See Tool tabs.

Fix 1: Restart Granular

If Granular has been open for days, a restart gives it a clean start.

1. Wait until your sessions show Ready, meaning no agent is mid-task.
2. Quit Granular. On a Mac, choose Granular → Quit or press ⌘Q. On Windows, close the window: click the × at the top right, or press Alt+F4. Closing the window quits Granular on Windows.
3. Open it again. Your projects and sessions come back where you left them.

If an agent is still working when you quit, Granular warns you and names the sessions. Choose Keep working and wait. Quit anyway stops those agents straight away, and anything they hadn't saved yet is lost.

Fix 2: Close sessions you aren't using

Closing a session is the way to archive it: it stops running, and its conversation is saved in the project's Previous list so you can still read it.

1. In the session list, hover over the session you're done with.
2. Click the … (Session options) button that appears.
3. Choose Close session.

A few things to know:

• Busy sessions ask first. If something is still running, Granular asks Close this chat? and names it. Click Stop and close only if you really want to stop it; Cancel leaves it running.
• Closed sessions are read-only. To look back at one, click Previous at the bottom of the session list, then click the session. You can read the whole conversation, including commands and their output, but you can't continue it. To pick the work up again, start a new session in the same project; your files are all still there.
• Your files are untouched. Closing a session doesn't delete anything in your project folder.
• A project is never empty. If you close its last session, Granular opens a fresh one for you.

Using boss and worker agents? Workers are sessions too. Once the boss has merged a worker's finished work, close that worker. See Boss and worker agents.

A good habit: keep only the sessions you're actively using open, and close the rest at the end of each day. Close extra terminal tabs and Preview tabs you've finished with too.

Fix 3: Start big jobs in a fresh session

Before a large task, such as building a new site or a long research job, start a new session rather than carrying on in a chat that's already very long.

1. Press ⌘T (Ctrl+T on Windows), or open Quick actions with ⌘K and choose New session.
2. Tell the agent what you want, and point it at the files or notes it needs.

A fresh session is lighter for Granular and gives the agent a clear head. If you keep a digital brain, the agent can read your standing context from it, so you don't have to repeat yourself.

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