Tabs, groups and split view

Every screen you open in a world becomes a tab, and tabs live in groups that you can lay out side by side, or one above the other. Keep the lore entry for a character open beside the scene they're in, a second scene next to the first, or the timeline next to your outline. This guide is the how-to for tabs and groups; The desktop workbench shows how they fit with the sidebar and the scene details.

Tabs

• On a wide window (a computer, or an iPad that's at least 700 pixels wide), tabs sit in a strip above each group. Click one to show it, and its × (or the middle mouse button) to close it. Home, Stats, the Timeline and every other screen get tabs too, not only scenes and lore entries.
• On a phone, tap Tabs in the bar at the bottom of a world (it shows how many are open) to see your scenes and lore entries, switch between them or close them. Other screens aren't tabs there; the bar's other buttons go to them.

Your tabs and how they're laid out are remembered for each world, on each device. A phone shows the scenes and lore entries of the layout you built on a computer, one after another, and leaves the layout itself as it was.

To open something without leaving what you're reading, right-click it in a list (or long-press on a touch screen) and choose Open in new tab. It opens as a tab behind the current one.

Preview tabs and kept tabs

Clicking around shouldn't leave a trail of tabs behind you. So when you open something from the sidebar, a link, a lore mention or the search, it opens as a preview tab, shown in italics, and the next thing you open replaces it.

A preview tab becomes a normal tab, one that stays, when you:

• start editing what it shows;
• double-click the tab;
• drag it somewhere;
• right-click it and choose Keep open, or press ⌥ ⇧ K (Alt Shift K).

Each group has at most one preview tab.

Going back

Each group remembers the order you looked at things in. ⌘ ⌥ ← goes back in the group you're in and ⌘ ⌥ → goes forward (Ctrl Alt on Linux, Ctrl Alt Shift on Windows). If you closed a tab by mistake, ⌥ ⇧ T reopens the last one.

Groups and split view

A group is a tab strip over the screen on show. Start with one; add more to see two or three things at once.

• Click the Split view button (the two-panes icon) at the end of a group's tab strip and choose Split right, or press ⌥ ⇧ \ (Alt Shift \). The tab you're on moves into a new group on the right.
• Right-click a scene or lore entry in a list (or select a lore mention) and choose Open beside. It opens in the group to the right, or in a new group if there isn't one, and the group you're writing in keeps the focus, so you can carry on typing.
• Right-click a tab and choose Split right or Split down to move that tab into a new group.

Only the focused group takes what you open next, and the address in your browser follows it. Click anywhere in a group to focus it, or use ⌘ ⌥ 1, 2 or 3 (Ctrl Alt on Linux, Ctrl Alt Shift on Windows) to jump to the first, second or third group. A screen is only ever open in one group: opening one that's already open in another group takes you there.

Drag the divider between groups to give one more room. A group can be as narrow as 240 pixels, so how many groups you can have depends on the window's width; when there isn't room for another, the menu's split commands are dimmed. On a window too narrow for all your groups, only the focused one shows.

The group menu

The same Split view button at the end of a group's strip also has the layout commands.

• Split right, Split down: move the tab you are on into a new group beside or below this one.
• Maximize group (⌥ ⇧ M) shows this group on its own, which is handy for writing; it becomes Show all groups to bring the others back.
• One column, Two columns, Three columns and Two rows rearrange all your tabs into that layout.
• Close group closes the group and its tabs. It needs at least two groups.

A group you split but haven't filled says "Nothing open here". Open something from the sidebar (it lands in the focused group) or drag a tab into it.

Drag and drop

With a mouse or trackpad on a wide window:

• Reorder tabs by dragging a tab along its strip.
• Move a tab to another group by dragging it onto that group's strip, or onto the group itself.
• Open a scene or lore entry by dragging it from the sidebar (a scene or page in the navigator) onto a group.

While you drag, each group shows where it will land:

• the middle (Open here) puts it in that group;
• an edge (Split left, Split right, Split up or Split down) makes a new group on that side and puts it there.

On a touch screen, long-press a tab instead. Its menu has the same moves, including Move tab left and Move tab right.

Right-click menus

Right-click (or long-press on a touch screen, or Shift F10 from the keyboard) for shortcuts:

• On a tab: Keep open (for a preview), Split right, Split down, Move tab left, Move tab right, Close tab, Close other tabs, and Delete scene… or Delete entry….
• On a scene or lore entry in a list: Open in new tab, Open beside, and Delete scene… or Delete entry…. Deleted things go to Recently deleted.
• On a scene or chapter in the sidebar's outline: New scene after this one (or New scene in this chapter), as well as the above.
• On selected text in a scene or page: Cut, Copy and Paste, then the formatting you'd find on the toolbar (Bold, Italic, Dialogue quotes, Comment and so on), ticked where it's already on, with Undo, Redo and Select all.
• In a text box: Cut, Copy, Paste and Select all. On selected text elsewhere: Copy. On a link to another site: Copy link address.

The browser's own menu (Reload, Inspect and the rest) never appears. Where there's nothing useful to offer, right-click does nothing.

For all the keys, see Keyboard shortcuts.