Split view

A split view puts up to six sessions of the same project side by side in the main window, so you can watch several agents work at once and switch between them with a click or a shortcut. Throughout this page ⌘ is Cmd on macOS and Ctrl on Windows and Linux.

What a split view is

A split view is a named set of sessions from one project, shown together as a grid. Each session gets a pane: a full session view with its own Agent, Review, Explorer and Git tabs and its own scratch terminals, under a slim header.

Nothing about the sessions themselves changes. They keep their worktrees, branches and agents, and you can take a session out of a split view, or dissolve the whole thing, at any time without stopping anything.

Creating a split view

Either of these opens the New split view dialog:

• On a session row, open the ⋯ menu and choose Add to split view ▸ New split view…. That session is ticked already.
• On a project row, open the ⋯ menu and choose New split view….

Give it a Name (it starts as "Split view", then "Split view 2" and so on), tick up to six sessions under Sessions, and click Create split view. The sessions are listed in the order the sidebar shows them, and the panes take that order. The new split view opens straight away.

A session can be in only one split view. If a session you tick is already in another one, its row says which ("in Frontend"), and creating the new split view moves it out of the old one.

To add a session to a split view that already exists, open the session's ⋯ menu and choose Add to split view, then the split view's name. It becomes the last pane. A split view that already has six panes is greyed out and marked Full (6).

In the sidebar

A split view has its own row in its project's session list, with its panes listed under it as ordinary session rows. The row shows:

• a grid icon in the colour of the pane that most needs you: amber when a pane is waiting for you, green when one is working, blue when one is delegating, grey when all are idle,
• the split view's name,
• one dot per pane, coloured like that pane's own row dot, and the number of panes.

The chevron collapses or expands the panes under the row. The row is highlighted while one of its panes is the session you are looking at.

Drag a split view's row to move it among the project's sessions. Drag a session inside a split view to change the order of the panes. You can't drag a session into or out of a split view: use Add to split view and Remove from split view in its ⋯ menu instead.

Opening a split view

Click the split view's row. The grid opens on the pane you last had focused, or on its first pane the first time.

Selecting any of its sessions also opens the split view, with that session's pane focused. That holds however you get there: its row in the sidebar, ⌘K search, a dashboard row or a notification.

Working in panes

One pane is focused at a time. It has a thin coloured outline and a tinted header. Click anywhere in a pane to focus it.

The focused pane is the session you are working on:

• the bar along the top of the window shows its session and that session's actions, including the Stack pill — so a stacked session's Stack panel opens inside the focused pane, and each pane keeps its own,
• the session shortcuts act on it: ⌘1 to ⌘4 switch its tabs, ⌘J toggles its terminal panel, the git shortcuts run on its branch, and ⌥↑ / ⌥↓ focus the pane of the session one layer up or down its stack — when that session is in the same split view; otherwise the keys pass through.

Each pane's header shows the session's name and its status indicators — its state among them, as an icon — then three buttons:

• Open in new window: moves the session into a window of its own (see below).
• Maximize pane / Restore pane: the maximized pane fills the whole split view. The other panes are hidden but keep running. Maximizing a pane also focuses it.
• × (Remove from split view): see Removing panes and dissolving.

Drag the dividers between panes to resize them. Plexus remembers the sizes for each split view.

Every agent keeps running whether its pane is on screen or not: when you open another session, collapse the split view's row, or maximize a different pane. A hidden pane is never stopped, and the Maximum sessions kept ready setting never shuts down a pane of the split view you have open, including panes hidden behind a maximized one.

After a restart, each split view comes back with its layout, its pane sizes, the pane that was focused and the pane that was maximized.

Layouts

Open the split view row's ⋯ menu and choose Layout:

The panes fill the layout in pane order, so in Main + stack the first session in the split view is the large one. Drag a session to the top of the split view in the sidebar to make it the main pane.

To rename a split view, choose Rename… in the same menu.

Removing panes and dissolving

To take a session out of a split view, click the × in its pane's header, or choose Remove from split view in the session's ⋯ menu. The session goes back to being an ordinary row, placed just below the split view in the sidebar, and its agent keeps running.

If you remove the pane you have focused with the ×, focus moves to the next pane (or the previous one if it was the last), so the split view stays on screen. When the last pane is removed, the split view goes away. A split view with a single pane stays until you remove that pane or dissolve it.

Dissolve split view in the split view row's ⋯ menu takes all its sessions out at once. They become ordinary rows where the split view was, in pane order. Nothing is stopped or deleted, so there is no confirmation.

Archiving and deleting a pane's session

Archiving or deleting a session also takes it out of its split view, and the other panes stay as they are. A split view whose sessions are all gone disappears.

When you restore an archived session, it comes back as an ordinary row at the end of its project's session list, not in the split view it used to be in. Add it back from its ⋯ menu if you want it there.

Panes in their own window

A pane's Open in new window button moves its session into a window of its own, as described in Multiple windows. The session stays in the split view: its pane says the session is open in another window and offers Focus window and Bring back here. The pane keeps its header, so you can still maximize it or remove it from the split view from the main window.

When the session comes back to the main window, it shows in its pane again.

Clicking the split view's row opens it on a pane the main window holds, so the focused pane is always one you can type into. Clicking the moved session's own row brings its window to the front, as it does for any session in another window.

Limits

• Up to six panes per split view.
• A split view holds sessions of one project. Sessions from different projects can't share one.
• A session is in at most one split view at a time.
• Archived sessions can't be added.
• Split views are kept on this computer. They aren't part of cross-device sync, because sessions aren't either.

Shortcuts

These work whenever the session you are looking at is in a split view, even while a terminal has focus. Otherwise the keys pass through to whatever has focus. The keys are matched by their position on the keyboard: [ and ] are the two keys to the right of P, whatever your keyboard layout prints on them.

Next and previous go round the panes in pane order, skipping any pane whose session is in another window. Moving to a pane this way also moves the keyboard there: into the agent terminal when the pane is showing its Agent tab and the agent is running, otherwise onto the pane itself. While a pane is maximized, next and previous maximize the next or previous pane instead. All three are rebindable under Settings → Shortcuts; see Keyboard shortcuts.

Related

• Sessions & worktrees — what a session is.
• Multiple windows — moving a session, a project or a terminal into its own window.
• Stacks & ordered merging — how stacks are drawn when part of one is in a split view, and the Stack panel.
• Keyboard shortcuts — every shortcut, and how to rebind them.