Split view

You can keep reference material beside your writing.

Several places at once

The areas down the left used to be one choice: opening World put the manuscript away. Now they can be tabs.

Ctrl+click an area in the sidebar — or middle-click it — and it opens in a tab of its own, leaving what you had where it was. A plain click still moves the tab you are in. The same works on Home: Ctrl+click a project, or right-click it and choose Open in a new tab, to have two books open side by side.

A tab remembers where you were: the project, the book, the area, and how the panes were arranged there. Leaving the manuscript to check a character and coming back puts the arrangement back too.

Right-click a tab to close it, close the others, or close everything to its left or right. Middle-click closes one. The strip only appears once you have more than one place open, and the last tab always stays.

QuillArk keeps one project loaded at a time, so moving to a tab in another project reloads it as you arrive. That is a quick read of the project’s own files; what it avoids is every project you have glanced at staying in memory for the rest of the session.

Panes inside a place

Choose a layout from the Layout control above the workspace: one pane, two side by side, two stacked, three, or four.

Those are starting points, not the whole story. Every pane has two buttons of its own: split side by side and split one above the other. Splitting the right-hand pane of a two-pane layout downwards gives one tall pane beside two stacked ones — an arrangement no named layout describes. Four panes is the most that fits usefully, so the buttons stop there.

Drag the divide between two panes to give one more room than the other. Each divide belongs to the two panes on either side of it and nothing else: in a four-pane arrangement, widening the top-left pane leaves the two below it exactly where they were.

Each pane also has its own close button. Closing one gives its space back to its neighbours in proportion, and whatever was open in it moves to the first pane rather than disappearing. Closing one of four leaves two above and one across the bottom, rather than rearranging everything into three columns.

Getting things into a pane

The + button above the workspace opens anything the project holds: a story arc, a character or place, a research note or brain dump, a mind map, the outline, the corkboard, statistics, or this handbook. It opens in the pane you last used, so you can keep the magic system beside chapter four while you write.

You can also drag a chapter from the list on the left, or drag a tab from one pane to another to rearrange.

One click or two

A single click in the manuscript list opens a chapter in place — its tab is shown in italics, and the next single click takes its place. That way looking through ten chapters leaves one tab rather than ten.

A double click opens a chapter to stay. Double-clicking a tab that is already in italics keeps that one too.

Right-click a tab to close it, close the others, close everything to its left or right, or close them all.

Saved layouts

A layout you use often can be kept. The bookmark button beside the layout control opens Saved layouts: give the current arrangement a name and it is stored with the project. Opening it later puts the same documents back in the same panes.

A layout records which documents were open where, not what they said, so opening one always reads the current files from disk. Removing a layout removes only the arrangement.

You can also reach it from the command palette with Ctrl+Shift+P, “Saved layouts”.