Terminal tour

Pairlens opens on a live chart. Everything else is one click or one keystroke away. Here is the map, along with the handful of words the terminal uses in a specific way.

Four words to know first

Pair. A market. Always two assets: what you are buying and what you are paying with. BTC-USDT is Bitcoin priced in Tether. AAPL is Apple priced in dollars. Traders say “pair” even for a stock, out of habit.

Venue. The exchange or broker a price came from. Bitcoin does not have one price, it has a price on Binance, another on Coinbase, another on Kraken. They are close but never identical, and you can only trade at the venue you are connected to.

Panel. One box on screen doing one job: a chart, an order book, a list of your positions.

Workspace. A saved arrangement of panels. You will build a few, one per way you trade.

The left nav

The rail down the left edge is how you move between the big surfaces. Each section keeps its own colour, so after a week you stop reading labels and just look at where the colour is.

Below those sit your workspaces, your recent pairs, and the Workspace Store.

The workspace grid

The middle of the window is your workspace: panels tiled into a grid you arrange. Drag a separator to resize. Use the menu on a panel’s header to split it, replace it, or close it.

Sixty-eight panels ship in the box. You will use six of them daily. Broadly:

Finding something to trade. Scanner, watchlist, movers, heatmaps, the funding and basis scanners for perps, the launchpad columns for memecoins, the event board for predictions, the earnings and economic calendars for stocks.

Reading a market. Chart, order book, market depth, liquidity heatmap, multi-price, plus the ones specific to a market type: funding on a perp, pool stats on-chain, the session clock on a stock, the probability chart on an event.

Trading it. Trade entry, positions, portfolio, risk, and the class-specific tickets like the NFT sweep ticket or the prediction basket.

Context. News, symbol news, social, and What Moved It.

Full catalogue in panels; the layout model in workspaces.

Each market type keeps its own layout, with a default built for what it trades. Rearranging your perpetuals desk leaves your spot desk alone. Beyond the default, each type carries named boards in the ⌘⇧L menu: Research on spot, Carry and Risk on perps, Liquidity and Cross-Chain on-chain, Company on stocks, Race on predictions.

Discovery: where to look when you do not know what to trade

The Discovery page is the market-wide view, and it changes completely depending on which tab you pick. Only one of them is a plain list of pairs. Futures opens on funding and basis, on-chain opens on chains and pools, memecoins on four columns of launchpad tokens, NFTs on collections, equities on the session and the calendars, predictions on the event board.

That is deliberate. What you want to see first is different for each market: on a perp it is who is paying whom to hold a position, on a stock it is whether the market is even open.

The pair header

The strip above the grid names what you are looking at: the symbol, the current price, the 24-hour change, and the venue streaming it. Click the symbol to switch markets. A connection dot shows stream health and says Reconnecting if a feed goes quiet, which normally happens after a laptop wakes from sleep.

Beside the symbol sits a coloured badge naming the market type: SPOT, PERP, DEX, MEME, STOCK or EVENT. This matters more than it looks. Buying $100 of a spot pair and buying $100 of a perpetual are different trades with different ways to lose, so the badge says which one you are on rather than leaving you to decode the ticker. Three of them add the detail that changes the answer: a pool names its chain, a stock names the session when you are outside regular hours, an event says whether it is a yes-or-no question or a field of several answers. Hover for a one-line explanation.

The venue button next to it lists only the venues that can serve what you are looking at. Spot exchanges under a spot pair, perpetual venues under a perp, your broker under a stock. Tokens and event contracts carry their venue inside their own identity, so there the button is a label rather than a menu: a Polymarket contract does not exist on Kalshi, and the same address on a different chain is a different asset.

That same button sits on the CEX Spot Discovery board, so you can change exchange while browsing rather than opening a pair you did not want. It is one choice across the app: pick Binance there and the scanner, the movers table, the heatmap and every watchlist row price on Binance from then on.

Want a running strip of live prices for pairs you have been watching? Turn on the marquee in Settings → Appearance.

The assistant

An orb sits in the nav rail with a line of text that changes with the page: Analyze the chart of BTC/USDT on a chart, Build a workflow on the workflows page. Click it, or press ⌘/, and a chat opens over the terminal.

Ask it what a panel is telling you, to add an indicator, to research an asset, or to draft an order. It reads what is on your screen, so “why is this moving?” is a complete question. It can propose a trade but never place one: those arrive as a card you approve or reject.

Prefer it in the corner? Settings → Assistant moves the orb to the bottom right. The chat window drags anywhere by its header and stays where you drop it. It sits outside the workspace grid, so it takes no layout space and minimizing it never stops work already running. See the AI assistant.

What the address bar says

A chart’s web address names three things: the market type, the venue, and the instrument.

/spot/okx/BTC-USDT        a crypto spot pair on OKX
/spot/gate/BTC-USDT       the same pair, Gate's book
/stocks/alpaca/AAPL       a US stock through your broker
/dex/base/0x532f…-WETH    a token on Base, addressed by contract

The venue is in the address because a price without its exchange is not a fact. Switching venue changes the address, so the back button returns you to the previous venue with the drawings you made there, and a link you send someone opens the exact market you were looking at.

Tokens are addressed by contract rather than ticker, because dozens of tokens share a symbol and a link built from a ticker can open the wrong asset. Older /pair/BTC-USDT links still work and redirect to the full form.

Search everything

Press ⌘K (Ctrl+K on Windows and Linux). This is the shortcut to learn. It searches:

• Pairs, including ones you have never opened
• Venues, which switches the chart on a pair page and sets your default elsewhere
• Pages, workspaces, workflows, and alert rules
• Panels you can add to the current layout
• Plugins
• Actions such as switching theme, opening settings, or opening a new window

Multiple windows

On the desktop app you can pull any view into its own window with ⌘N, from the titlebar button, or from search. Windows stay in sync, and a notification fires once rather than once per window.

Signed in or not

Everything above works with no account. Signing in with your email adds cross-device sync for workspaces, chart layouts, alerts, workflows and your trade journal, and offers it for your assistant conversations, which stay on the device that made them until you say otherwise.

Signing in never changes where your keys live. Exchange credentials stay on your device either way.

Where to next

• Reading the market for the book, the tape, and depth
• The chart for chart types, drawings, and indicators
• Trading to connect a venue and place your first order
• Keyboard shortcuts for the full list
• Glossary if a term here was new