Shared workspaces
Set up a workspace once in a Plexus organization so every member gets the same repositories in their sidebar: join modes, leaving, cloning, and seats.
A shared workspace is one an organization sets up once so that everybody in it gets the same workspace holding the same repositories — without anybody being told which folders to clone or what to call them.
It is the third thing a plan unlocks, and the first one that reaches across a team rather than across your own machines. It also needs a seat, which is the part worth reading before anything else on this page.
What one is, once you are in it
A workspace you joined is an ordinary workspace in your sidebar. It sits with your own, holds projects, holds sessions, and everything you do inside it — worktrees, the agent terminal, review, the git client, hooks, pull requests — behaves exactly as it does anywhere else. The only difference is where its name and its repository list came from.
The organization owns three things: the workspace's name, its description, and the repositories attached to it. Everything else is yours — your settings overrides on it, your sessions, your checkouts, your branches. Nothing an administrator does can reach those.
You can tell one at a glance: the organization's name sits beside the workspace in the sidebar, and its ⋯ menu is a different list rather than a greyed-out version of the usual one. Edit…, Delete workspace and Set as default are absent, because they belong to the organization; Leave, Why do I have this? and Organization workspaces… are there instead. Settings… stays exactly where it is — your overrides on the workspace are yours, and they are the reason it is a real workspace rather than a read-only listing. An organization's workspace is never your default one — the star stays on a workspace of your own.
Nothing is cloned onto your machine until you ask for it. Joining a workspace adds rows to a sidebar, not repositories to your disk.
The whole surface lives in Settings → Organizations, in the Shared workspaces row. The page shows one organization at a time — pick it from the organization picker at the top — and the row is about that one; select it to open it in the side panel.
The three modes
Every workspace is set up in one of three modes, and the mode decides how you get in. It is shown beside the name in the list.
| Mode | What it means | What you press |
|---|---|---|
| Open | Anybody in the organization can join it, whenever they like. | Join |
| Request | People ask, and an administrator answers. | Ask to join |
| Invite only | Only people an administrator adds are in it. | Nothing — you are added, or you are not. |
A workspace you are not in tells you as little as its mode allows. In request mode you are shown the name and nothing else — no description, no repository list — until you are actually in it; in invite only mode you are not shown it at all until somebody adds you.
Joining, and asking to join
Open Settings → Organizations, pick the organization, and find Shared workspaces. It lists what that organization shares with you, with a line above it saying when the list was last checked.
- Join puts an open workspace in your sidebar straight away.
- Ask to join sends a request on a request-mode workspace. The row then reads "Waiting for an administrator to answer", and Cancel request takes it back.
If your request is not taken up, the row says so and gives you a date:
You asked to join and weren't added. You can ask again on 14 October 2026.
Ask to join is greyed out until that day. Two things about it are deliberate. There is no reason attached — the app does not record one and will not invent one, so it says "weren't added" rather than "declined". And the wait is on asking again, not on being added: an administrator can put you in at any moment, and the answer to a workspace you need today is a conversation rather than a countdown.
Leaving, and what leaving does not do
Leave is in the ⋯ menu on the workspace row, and it is never refused. Not for want of a plan, not for want of a seat, not for want of a permission, and not for want of the internet — the app does its half immediately and tells the organization when it can reach it. A workspace somebody else put on your machine is one you can always get off it.
The dialog also tells you whether you can come back, and the answer comes from the organization rather than from a guess:
- Open — "You can rejoin at any time."
- Request — "You'd have to request access again."
- Invite only — "You can't rejoin — an admin has to invite you." This one is shown as a warning, because it is the only version of Leave you cannot undo yourself.
Rejoining later reuses the same workspace, rather than adding a second copy beside it: your checkouts, your sessions and your branches come back with it.
Why you have one you did not create
A workspace can appear in your sidebar without you having done anything — that is the point of Add everyone automatically, and of an administrator putting a team into a workspace in one go.
So the ⋯ menu answers the question directly. Why do I have this? names how you came to hold it — "You were added automatically — Acme gives this workspace to every new member", "You joined this workspace yourself", "Dana added you to this workspace", "You asked to join, and Dana approved it" — plus the mode it is in, and a reminder of which half is the organization's and which half is yours.
It is exactly those facts and no more. There is no history behind it, no log of who changed what, and nothing dated; the name it shows was copied down when you were added, so it still reads correctly after that person has left the organization.
The repositories attached to it
The organization's repositories appear under the workspace as rows marked Not on this machine, each naming the repository it stands for, with one button — Clone, which names the project it would fetch, because a workspace holding four of these needs four buttons that are not all called the same thing. Pressing it hands the address to the usual Add repository dialog: you choose where the checkout goes, and it arrives already in the right workspace.
That is the whole of it, and the restraint is the design. An organization's list of repositories is a list, not an instruction to fill your disk — you clone the ones you are working on, when you are working on them. A cloned one becomes an ordinary project: sessions, worktrees, review, hooks, pull requests, all identical to a repository you added yourself.
If an attachment was added without a clone URL, its button is disabled and says so — ask an administrator to add one.
Setting them up
Everything below needs a role that grants it. Owner and Admin hold all five workspace permissions by default; Maintainer, Member and Restricted hold none of them, so a curator role that should also run workspaces is a copy of a role with those boxes ticked. The five sit under Workspaces and projects in the role editor: Create workspaces, Attach projects, Edit workspaces, Delete workspaces and Manage membership.
Pick the organization on Settings → Organizations and open its Shared workspaces row and press Manage. A control you may not use is absent rather than disabled, so the buttons you see are the ones you can press.
Creating and changing one
New workspace asks for four things:
| Field | What it decides |
|---|---|
| Name | What everybody sees in their sidebar. |
| Description | One line, shown to the people who can see the workspace. |
| Who can join | Open, Request or Invite only — the three modes. |
| Add everyone automatically | Whether people who join the organization from now on receive this workspace without asking. |
Add everyone automatically applies to new members only, and turning it off later removes nobody. There is deliberately no version of this switch that takes a workspace back off everybody who has it — that is what Withdraw is, and it is a decision worth making on purpose.
The people already in the organization are a separate, confirmed act rather than a side effect of ticking a box. Add everyone — in the account panel on the web, beside the same workspace — adds everybody who is in the organization right now, tells you how many that is before you confirm, and adds nobody twice.
Edit changes the same four fields on a workspace that already exists. A mode change applies from that moment: it decides how people get in from now on, and nobody in the workspace is ever ejected by it.
Repositories
Repositories on a workspace lists what is attached and lets you add more. An attachment carries a name, one or more repositories as host/owner/name (one per line — a member's checkout is matched to it by its git remote), a clone URL, and optionally a base branch and a subfolder.
Remove detaches a repository. It stops being handed out; nobody's existing checkout is touched.
Who is in a workspace
People opens the roster: everybody who has the workspace, how each of them came to have it, and who added them. A filter narrows it, and Show more people pages through a long list.
- Waiting to join (n) sits above the roster when there are requests. Add puts the person in. Not now does not, and tells you the cost before you confirm: they will not be added, they cannot ask again for a set number of days, and you can still add them yourself at any time.
- Add someone from Acme adds a member directly, whatever mode the workspace is in. This is how invite-only workspaces are filled.
- Remove takes somebody out. Everything on their machine stays exactly where it is — the workspace, the checkouts, the sessions and the branches — it simply stops being the organization's for them, which is the same thing that happens when somebody leaves of their own accord.
Withdrawing a workspace
Withdraw takes a workspace out of the organization's catalogue. It stops being handed out, and on every machine that received it, it stops being the organization's.
Nobody's work is touched by it: no checkout, no session, no worktree and no branch. The people who had it keep the workspace and everything under it; it is theirs from then on.
If more seats are handed out than the plan pays for
Seats can be released in the payment provider's portal while people still hold them, which leaves an organization with more people holding a seat than it is paying for. When that happens, the admin panel shows a warning naming both numbers, and changing workspaces is paused until it is fixed.
The buttons are not greyed out, on purpose. Those counts are as old as the last check, so a control disabled on them would refuse a change the moment somebody took a seat back and before the app noticed. Instead the refusal arrives when you press, in a sentence naming both numbers and the remedy, with the dialog still open and everything you typed still in it.
| Paused | Still works |
|---|---|
| Creating a workspace · editing one · attaching a repository · adding somebody · approving a request | Every read · joining · asking to join · leaving · declining a request · removing somebody · detaching a repository · withdrawing a workspace |
Staying up to date
Plexus checks an organization's workspaces on its own: when it starts, when you switch back to its window, a couple of seconds after you change something, and on a schedule for as long as the window is open. So a workspace an administrator creates, edits or withdraws reaches you without restarting the app. Refresh in the admin panel asks immediately, and the list of workspaces carries its own clock — Checked 4 minutes ago, or Not checked yet — because what a local copy can never promise is freshness.
The schedule is the one on the Sync page — Check for changes every (minutes) — which paces both this and cross-device sync. This check does not require Sync this machine to be on: it is a list arriving from your organization, and nothing about your machine or your workspaces leaves in either direction. What it does require is being signed in; sign out and it stops with everything else on your account.
What sync does and does not carry
Cross-device sync carries your own settings, workspaces and projects between your machines. An organization's workspaces are not part of it, and that is a design decision rather than an omission: each of your machines receives them from the organization directly, so the organization's names and repository lists never enter your personal account, and turning sync off does not stop them arriving.
The two also behave differently when a repository is missing locally. A Not on this machine row from another of your own machines offers Locate…, Clone… and a candidate picker; an organization's offers Clone alone. See The repositories attached to it for why.
What needs a seat, and what never stops
A seat is what buys the receiving. Browsing an organization's workspaces, joining one, asking to join, getting updates, and every part of setting them up need the organization's plan to cover shared workspaces and you to hold one of its seats.
Three things carry on regardless, and each is deliberate:
- What you already joined. Workspaces on your machine stay, with their repositories, sessions, worktrees and branches, and keep working. What a lapse costs is the updating, not the having.
- Leaving. Never gated, in any state, on any plan. A member may always go.
- Taking something back. An administrator can still remove somebody, detach a repository and withdraw a workspace after a plan lapses — because otherwise a lapsed organization could not stop a departed employee receiving its workspaces, which is exactly backwards.
And nothing local is affected by any of it. Sessions, worktrees, the agent terminal, review, the explorer, the git client, hooks, pull requests and the dashboard are identical with a seat and without one, and always will be.
Related
- Plans, seats and billing — what a seat is, and how one is given.
- Managed settings — the other thing an organization hands its members: a setting value, recommended or enforced, on the same page in the app.
- Prompts your organization publishes — the third: a prompt template, as a numbered revision in every member's list.
- Roles and permissions — the five workspace permissions and who holds them.
- Your Plexus account — organizations, and the page in the app where their members, invitations and seats live.
- Cross-device sync — the other half of what follows you, and why an organization's workspaces are not part of it.
- Core concepts — what a workspace is in the first place.