Panes

A pane is a container holding one terminal together with the application's own interface around it. This is what the container looks like:

+------------------------------------------+
| title, and any plugin content for the pane|   <- the header, and the drag handle
+------------------------------------------+
|                                          |
|               terminal                   |
|                                          |
+------------------------------------------+
| plugin footer content, when there is any |   <- hidden while empty
+------------------------------------------+

Dragging a pane to a new position

A pane can be moved by dragging its header onto another pane. While the drag is in progress the target shows which half the pane would occupy, and dropping divides the target's area in half along that edge.

• Drop on the left or right part of a pane: the two end up side by side.
• Drop on the top or bottom part: the two end up stacked.
• The indication follows the pointer between edges, so the result is known before the pane is dropped.
• A drag that leaves every pane, or ends anywhere else, changes nothing.

The header is the handle rather than the whole pane, because dragging across a terminal body is text selection — a gesture a terminal user relies on constantly.

A moved pane keeps its identity: the terminal and the process running in it are the same afterwards, and focus follows the pane to its new position. The space the pane vacated is reclaimed by whatever shared it, so no gap is left behind. A drop on a pane's own area does nothing.

Headers and the terminal's title

Clicking a terminal or its header makes that pane active: keyboard input, pane actions and the focused highlight follow the same pane. Dragging within terminal text remains selection; only the header is a pane-movement handle.

A pane's header shows the title the program in that terminal has set, through the usual OSC escapes, alongside a permanent #N identity label supplied by the host. Workspace terminal counts in both sidebar forms also belong to the host and do not require a plugin. Programs use titles to advertise what they are doing. Examples include a file open in an editor, a host being connected to, a build in progress — so the header is the natural place to read it.

When a title changes on a pane that is not focused, the header is marked and stays marked until that pane is focused. A title change on the focused pane leaves no mark, because the user is already looking at it.

A pane whose terminal has never set a title, which is rare because most shells do at every prompt, falls back to showing the pane's number.

Plugin content for the pane's header appears beside the title; neither replaces the other. See plugins.

Terminal context menu

Right-click a terminal, or press Shift+F10 in the focused terminal. If the program has enabled mouse reporting, an ordinary right-click goes to that program; use Shift+right-click for Among's menu instead. Arrow keys navigate the menu, Enter activates a row, and Escape returns to terminal input.

The menu belongs to the requesting pane, not whichever pane was previously focused. It uses symbolic icons alongside text labels. Copy uses selected text, Paste delegates to VTE (including bracketed paste when enabled by the program), and Select All selects terminal text. Copy is disabled without a selection; Paste is disabled when the clipboard offers no text. Both states update while the menu is open. Select All includes available scrollback and blank terminal rows; Copy preserves the resulting text. Paste sends text to the receiving program rather than replaying a saved session. A shell may interpret pasted newlines, so do not paste untrusted commands.

At a pointer target, explicit hyperlinks take precedence over plain absolute http/https/mailto URLs. Copy Link uses the captured URI even if the pointer later moves. Other valid explicit schemes are copy-only; Open Link is disabled for them. Malformed, control-containing and oversized targets are not offered. Keyboard invocation has no link target and omits link entries. Open Link requests the desktop's handler asynchronously; failures are reported without shell execution.

Split Pane, Expand/Restore Pane and Close Terminal use the same operations as their shortcuts. The menu remains available when those shortcuts are unbound; its hints follow the current bindings. Closing the last terminal still asks for confirmation rather than silently exiting.

Closing and exiting

Closing the focused pane focuses the sibling that expands into its space. If that sibling is split, its first leaf in tree order wins. Closing a background pane preserves focus; process exit follows the same rule.

A pane is a terminal window and the application is what surrounds it, so closing cascades upward:

Ctrl+Shift+W    the pane and its process go, the layout closes up
  last pane     the workspace closes too
    last one    a confirmation appears before the application exits

A pane also closes when the process in it exits — typing exit, or a program that ends — following the same cascade. The exit is reported, naming the status when it is not zero, so a terminal disappearing is never mistaken for something the user did. Closing the window with the platform's close control takes the same path, including the confirmation.

The cascade stops at the last workspace: it asks rather than exiting, because every terminal's process goes with it.

Expanding a pane

Ctrl+Shift+X expands the focused pane to fill its workspace, and pressing it again restores the layout.

Only the rendering changes. The layout tree is untouched, so restoring brings back every pane at exactly the size and position it had, nested dividers included, and no terminal is restarted. Closing the expanded pane simply returns the workspace to its normal layout. Expanding in one workspace does not affect any other.