Splitting & Focus

NEXUS arranges terminals, bit pages, canvas previews, and the music player as panes in a single window. This page covers how that arrangement is created and changed: splitting, the grid presets, resizing, and Focus Mode.

There's no separate "split" command

Opening new content — a new session, a bit page, a second shell for another agent — splits whichever pane you're currently working in to make room for it, sizing the new pane to fit. You don't choose where the split goes or how big it is; NEXUS decides based on what's already on screen.

If the window is too small to add another pane at a comfortably readable size, NEXUS instead fits the new pane in wherever there's room, or grows the grid to make space, rather than shrinking every existing pane past the point of being usable.

Grid layouts: 2, 3, or 4 columns

Beyond a single, maximized pane (see Focus Mode below), NEXUS offers three explicit grid presets — 2, 3, or 4 columns — from the Session menu, the toolbar's layout control, or the Command Palette.

Choosing 4 Columns on a narrow window may render fewer columns than requested, for the same reason a new pane won't shrink below a readable size: NEXUS fits what it can rather than rendering four unusably thin panes just to match the number you picked.

Divider resize

Drag the divider between two panes to resize them. A drag only affects the two panes immediately on either side of that divider — it doesn't redistribute space across the rest of the grid, and there's no modifier key that changes this to resize a whole row or column at once. The divider also responds to the standard accessibility increment/decrement actions, for resizing without a mouse.

Focus Mode

Focus Mode expands the pane you're working in to fill the window. This is genuinely a single feature, not two — there's no separate action that permanently drops the other panes from the layout. Using the command again restores the grid exactly as it was, because Focus Mode only ever changes what's displayed: the underlying split shape and ratios sit untouched the whole time it's on, which is also why layout persistence can remember Focus Mode as a separate flag on top of the grid rather than needing to reconstruct the grid from scratch when you turn it off.

Toggle Focus Mode with ⌘J, or from the Session menu.

Where to go next

• Pane types — what can occupy the panes this page arranges.
• Layout persistence — what NEXUS remembers about your grid, per workspace, across relaunch.
• Keyboard Shortcuts reference — every shortcut used on this page.