Junction

A VS Code chat sidebar that connects your editor to local AI coding agents.

7 backends · Chat sidebar · Workspace context · Animated splash · MIT License

Junction is a chat panel for VS Code that connects to local AI coding agents running on your machine. It speaks to multiple agent backends through one unified interface — switch between them without changing your workflow.

Supported Backends

Junction connects to any of these local agent runtimes:

• OpenClaw — WebSocket gateway integration with session and model management
• Hermes — native dashboard WebSocket and REST API support
• Souveraine — HTTP server integration with managed runtime spawning
• MiMoCode — auto-spawned or pre-configured MiMo server connection
• Goose — data directory and secret key configuration
• OpenCode — binary path and config home settings
• OpenHands — server launcher and home directory configuration

Features

Chat Sidebar

Talk to your active agent from VS Code's secondary sidebar. Open via Command Palette: Junction: Open Sidebar.

Workspace Context

Drag and drop files into the chat input, or right-click a file or selection to add it to the current thread.

Model & Reasoning Picker

Select a model and set reasoning effort per session from the sidebar header.

Markdown Rendering

Assistant responses, tool call cards, reasoning blocks, and diffs render inline with syntax highlighting.

Chat Layouts

Switch between compact mode (activity folded into accordions) and timeline mode (chronological reasoning flow with sticky user prompts).

Follow-Up Modes

Queue messages for when the agent finishes, steer mid-turn, or interrupt and redirect. Configurable globally or per-bridge.

Auto-Reconnection

Junction reconnects to the runtime automatically if the connection drops. No manual restart needed.

Themes

Junction includes two built-in layouts. Compact mode folds activity into summary accordions for a dense view. Timeline mode shows a chronological activity rail with dot indicators, reasoning disclosure, and an orange accent theme. Both layouts adapt to your VS Code color theme.

Splash Screen & Animations

Junction opens with an animated splash screen featuring a matrix-style rain effect behind the wordmark. The splash screen is fully customizable through the in-editor animation settings panel.

Character Sets

The rain effect supports 10 character sets: Katakana, Matrix Latin, Latin, Hiragana, CJK, Hangul, Emoji, Binary, Symbols, and Custom. Mix in emoji drops at configurable rarity, or supply your own character set.

Rain Controls

• Direction — toggle rain falling up or down
• Reverse chance — set a percentage for drops to go the opposite direction
• Bounce sides — rain bounces off left/right edges instead of falling off screen
• Gravity, bounce, collision, speed — adjust how the drops move and interact with the wordmark
• Quantity, size variance, color variance, opacity range — control the density and look of the rain
• Custom color — pick a color and alpha for the rain and wordmark
• Emoji mixing — toggle on and set rarity as 1/N (1 = all emoji, 1000000 = one in a million)

Exit Animations

When the splash dismisses, the wordmark exits through one of 9 animation modes. Each mode has its own set of control sliders that swap in when you select it from the dropdown.

• Spiral out — letters spiral outward from the center
• Spiral in — letters converge into a tightening spiral with configurable radius and length
• Explode — letters burst outward with gravity
• Explode 2 — physics-based explosion with bouncing off edges, configurable force, chaos, and per-axis momentum
• Float away — letters drift upward with direction-based tilt
• Horizontal flatten — letters spread horizontally and crush to a 1px line with configurable hold time
• Explode weak — a softer explosion with less force
• Starwars crawl — letters converge to a vanishing point with configurable target Y position
• Explode 3 — the wordmark shatters into individual pixels with per-axis momentum control
• Rain push — letters detach and the rain physically pushes them off screen
• Random — picks a different mode each time

Animation Settings Panel

Open the animation settings from the chat header gear icon. It has three tabs — Chat, Bobber, and Splash. The Splash tab contains two collapsible accordions (Appearance and Motion), the exit mode dropdown with per-mode sliders, and a live preview canvas you can click to test animations. The panel is fully draggable and resizable with no height limit.

Installation

From source

npm install
./compile-and-install.sh
# Then: Ctrl+Shift+P → Developer: Reload Window

Requirements

• VS Code 1.120.0 or higher
• A local agent runtime running (e.g. OpenClaw Gateway, Hermes dashboard, Souveraine server)

There are easter eggs. They are not documented here. That is the point.

Credits

Based on openclaw_vscode by Owen-Liuyuxuan (MIT). The WebSocket/gateway plumbing traces back to that project. The multi-bridge architecture, modular webview UI, animation engine, and model/session managers are original to Junction.

MIT License. © Owen-Liuyuxuan (original openclaw_vscode), © Plaer1 (Junction). github.com/Plaer1/junction