Rail strip

The rail strip is the narrow icon column at the very left edge of the workbench — the outermost of the two left-hand layers (the sidebar list panel sits directly to its right and reshapes per rail). The strip itself stays put; clicking an icon swaps which rail is active.

This page is the visual reference. For how rails are loaded, enabled, reordered, and deep-linked, see the feature page Rail strip; for each rail's data flow and the hand-offs between them, see rail pipelines & hand-offs.

Anatomy

Element Behaviour
Icon column 48 px wide. One icon button per loaded + enabled rail, ordered by each rail's SortIndex.
Active icon Rendered at full opacity in the accent colour. Exactly one rail is active.
Inactive icons Dimmed to ~70 % opacity; hover surfaces the rail name in a tooltip and lifts the icon to full opacity.
Group separators Thin dividers between the declared Group buckets (home, work, scenarios, quality, hardening, admin, help), so related rails cluster visually.
Bottom cluster The Settings gear + theme toggle pin to the bottom of the strip, separated from the rail icons above.

The sidebar splitter

A vertical splitter runs down the right edge of the strip, between it and the sidebar. Drag it to widen or narrow the sidebar. The splitter uses hover-intent (a ~250 ms dwell before it highlights) so a cursor passing over it on the way elsewhere doesn't flash the grab affordance or trigger an accidental resize.

The per-rail sub-tab strip

Some rails carry more than one view. Rather than adding more icons to the strip, those rails render a sub-tab strip at the top of their main pane. The order is fixed per rail so muscle-memory holds:

  • Intercept → Captured | Live overrides | Mock servers | Settings
  • Workspaces → the detail pane dispatches into Collections / Environments / Recordings / Sources / Settings sub-views.

The sub-tab strip is a within-rail navigation surface; it never changes the active rail icon on the strip.

Cross-rail drop targets

Rail icons double as drop targets for cross-rail hand-offs. Dragging a Discover method (application/x-bowire-method) or a recording (application/x-bowire-recording) onto a rail icon that accepts it routes the payload into that rail — e.g. drop a method onto the Benchmarks icon to seed a load spec, or a recording onto the Intercept icon to boot a mock server. An icon highlights while a compatible payload hovers it; incompatible payloads show no drop affordance. See the hand-off primitives.

See also

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