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The Hermes Agent chat panel lives directly in your VS Code sidebar, giving you a full conversation interface without switching windows. You can ask questions about your code, request refactors, get explanations, and watch answers stream in with full Markdown formatting — all while your editor stays open in front of you.

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Opening the chat

Open the chat panel in either of two ways:
  • Click the Hermes Agent icon in the Activity Bar (left sidebar).
  • Press Ctrl+Shift+P (or Cmd+Shift+P on macOS) and run Hermes: Open Chat.
Hermes must show a green Ready status pill in the toolbar before you can send messages. If you see Connecting…, wait a moment or use the wrench menu to run environment detection.

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Sending messages

Type your message in the input box at the bottom of the panel and press Enter to send. To cancel a streaming response at any point, click the Stop button that appears during generation.
Use Shift+Enter to insert a newline in your message without sending it. This is useful for multi-line prompts, code snippets, or numbered lists of instructions.

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Streaming responses

Responses stream in real time and are rendered as Markdown with syntax-highlighted code blocks. The panel automatically scrolls to follow new output; scroll up manually at any time to pause auto-scroll, and it resumes after five seconds of inactivity while the response is still streaming. File paths that Hermes mentions in a response are rendered as clickable links — click any path to open that file directly in the editor.

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@file attachment

To include a workspace file in your conversation, type @ in the input box. A file picker opens, letting you search and select any file in your workspace. The selected file is attached to your next message and sent as context to the agent.

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Code insertion

Every code block in a Hermes response has a click-to-insert action. Click the code block to insert that snippet at your current cursor position in the active editor — no copy-paste required.

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Shell commands

When Hermes suggests a shell command as part of a response, that command is automatically mirrored to an integrated terminal in your workspace. You can review and run it there without leaving VS Code.

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Insert selection into chat

To send code you’re already looking at to Hermes:
  1. Select the code in your editor.
  2. Right-click and choose Hermes: Insert Selection into Chat, or run the command hermes.sendSelection from the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P / Cmd+Shift+P).
The selected text — including the file name and line number — is inserted into the chat input box so you can add context or a question before sending.

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Thoughts and tool calls

Two optional visibility settings control how much of Hermes’s internal reasoning you see:
  • hermes.showThoughts — shows the agent’s reasoning process as collapsible “thought” bubbles.
  • hermes.showToolCalls — shows notifications when the agent calls an editor tool (such as reading a file or checking diagnostics).
Both settings default to true. Disable either in Settings (Ctrl+, → search Hermes) to keep the chat panel cleaner.

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Token usage ring

A small ring icon in the chat toolbar shows your current token usage as a percentage of the session’s context window. The ring color shifts from neutral to amber to red as usage climbs. Hover over the ring to see exact token counts and a percentage label.