Overview

Mel Drive is your personal library of reusable terminal objects — workflows, prompts, notebooks, and environment-variable sets — living right in the tools panel. Save a parameterized command once, insert it into any prompt later; keep runbooks as notebooks; load a whole set of env vars into a pane in one click.

Drive is local-first: everything is stored as plain files under ~/.local/share/mel/drive/Personal/ (%APPDATA%\mel\drive\Personal\ on Windows), so it's yours to inspect, back up, or sync however you like.

Opening Drive

Open the tools panel with Ctrl+Shift+\ (⌃\ on a Mac) and click the Drive icon in the icon strip at the top, or press Ctrl+Shift+R to go straight to Drive. On first run, Drive is seeded with a sample workflow, a short notebooks guide and a folder of Starter prompts so the tree isn't empty.

The tree

The Drive view opens with the title Mel Drive and two buttons, Sort and Search. Under them, from top to bottom:

• Your team's section, when you are signed in — see Sharing with your team.
• PERSONAL. Click the word or its chevron to fold everything under it; the + at its right makes a new object.
• MCP Servers and Rules: two shortcuts, not folders. MCP Servers opens Settings ▸ Library, and Rules opens Settings ▸ Knowledge (Rules & MEL.md).
• Plans, a folder that appears once you have saved a plan to Drive — see Plans.
• Your folders and objects, each with its own painted type icon. Folders always sort first; Sort flips the name order.
• TRASH, at the bottom — see The Trash.

How you work with the tree:

• Search filters the tree live as you type.
• Hover previews — rest on any object to see a preview card: its title, a snippet of the command or body, and when it was last edited ("edited N ago", straight from the file's mtime).
• Click an object to use it. A workflow goes into the active pane's prompt with its first argument selected, and its card opens above the prompt. A prompt goes straight into the active pane's input. A notebook, rules file or environment-variable set opens in an editor in the center panel — Drive on the left, the editor in the middle, your terminal still on the right.
• Right-click an object or folder to move it to the Trash (and, for a team's owner or admin, to share it).

Sharing with your team

The team section sits above PERSONAL. Its row shows the team's name in capitals, with a chevron that folds the section.

• On a Business team, it lists the workflows, prompts, notebooks, rules and environment-variable sets your team shares. Members open them read-only; hover one to see who last changed it. The team's owner and admins also get an invite button on the row, which opens Settings ▸ Team. They right-click one of their own items and choose Share with team (later Update the team's copy), and Remove from team takes a shared item back out. Until something is shared, the section tells them how.
• If you are signed in but not on a team, the row shows your email address in capitals, an invite button (Set up a team) that opens Settings ▸ Team, and a short note on what a team is for. Signed out, there is no team section.

Creating objects: the + menu

The + button next to PERSONAL creates new objects:

• Folder — plain directory for organizing
• Workflow — a saved, parameterized command (details)
• Prompt — a saved agent prompt body (details)
• Notebook — a markdown document with a block menu (details)
• Rules — a *.rules.md file of rules the agent follows in every conversation on this computer (details)
• Environment variables — a named set of env vars (details)

Plans

When the agent writes a plan, the plan panel's ⋮ menu has Show in Mel Drive. It saves the plan as a notebook in a Plans folder, named after the plan's title, and opens it. The folder shows in the tree above your own items once it exists. A plan opens as a page ("Viewing") because you read it far more than you write it. Saving the same plan again reuses its notebook; a different plan with the same title gets a number after it. See Planning.

The Trash

Right-click a folder or an object and choose Move to Trash. It leaves the tree and Mel stops using it: a trashed rules file no longer reaches the agent, and the command palette's search and the Library no longer list it. Nothing is deleted yet.

Click TRASH at the bottom of the tree to open it. It lists what you trashed, newest first, with each item's icon and old name. Point at an item, or select it, to get two buttons:

• Restore puts it back where it was. If something new has taken that name, the restored item comes back beside it with " (restored)" added to the name, never over it.
• Delete asks you to confirm: it turns into Delete forever?, and a second press deletes the item for good, with everything inside a folder. Right-click offers the same two actions.

Mel says what happened after each move, restore and delete. An empty Trash says "The Trash is empty".

What's on disk

Folders are directories; objects are files named by kind:

Saved plans live in drive/Plans/ beside drive/Personal/, and trashed items in a drive/.trash/ folder, each with a small record of where it came from.

Because the store is just files, you can version it with git or drop objects in from another machine — Drive picks them up from the directory.

The four object kinds at a glance

• Workflows — commands with {argument} placeholders; clicking one inserts it into the prompt with the first argument pre-selected and opens its card above the prompt.
• Prompts — reusable agent prompt bodies; clicking one inserts the body as your query.
• Notebooks — markdown docs with a / block menu, an Editing / Viewing switch, and autosave.
• Environment variables — masked variable sets with pluggable sources; Load resolves and exports them into the active pane.

Related

• Code overview — the other half of the tools panel story