Window Modes

Browserland has two window modes that change how your windows are placed on the desktop: floating and tiling. This page explains the difference, how to switch, and how the tiling strip works.

The two modes

Mode	What it does
Floating	Free-moving, overlapping windows. You place each window anywhere, drag its title bar to move it, and drag its edges or corners to resize it. Windows can sit on top of one another.
Tiling	A niri-style horizontal strip of non-overlapping columns. Windows live side by side in columns; nothing overlaps, and the strip scrolls left and right when there are more columns than fit on screen.

The window mode is a per-host setting (one tab per broker), so each host can be in its own mode. A host with no saved mode starts in tiling.

Switching modes

You can flip between floating and tiling two ways:

• Control Panel → Windows → Window mode. Open the Control Panel (right-click the + button and choose Control panel, or the desktop → 🎛 Control panel, or press Ctrl+Alt+p), then tick or untick Tiling mode (unticked means floating).
• The "Toggle tiling mode" shortcut — default Ctrl+Alt+t.

The shortcut is rebindable like every other keyboard action. See Keyboard-Shortcuts to change it.

The tiling strip

In tiling mode, windows live in columns arranged along a horizontal strip. The strip can be wider than your screen, so only some columns are visible at once and the rest scroll into view.

Scrolling the strip

There are three ways to move the strip left and right:

• Use the workspace scrollbar, a slim bar at the bottom of the strip shown while it can scroll (on by default; Control Panel → Windows → Workspace scrollbar turns it off).
• Drag a tiled window near the strip edge — dragging toward the left or right edge scrolls the strip in that direction. Dragging a floating window never scrolls it.
• Use the focus-column and move-column shortcuts to bring off-screen columns into view as you focus or move them.

Action	Default binding
Focus column left	Ctrl+Alt+ArrowLeft
Focus column right	Ctrl+Alt+ArrowRight
Move column left	Ctrl+Alt+Shift+ArrowLeft
Move column right	Ctrl+Alt+Shift+ArrowRight

For column widths, moving and focusing columns, and ejecting a window into its own column, see Columns and Widths.

Moving windows between the two modes

You don't have to switch the whole desktop to move a single window between styles:

• Snap a floating window into the strip, or pop a tiled window out to a float, using the hold-to-snap and pop-out drag gestures (with a mouse or pen; a touch drag on a title bar does nothing) — or, without dragging, with Tile this window / Float this window on the window's title-bar right-click menu (see Context-Menus) — see Snapping and Pop-out.
• Inside tiling mode, organize windows into tabs, splits, and rows by dragging them onto each other — see Arranging Windows.

Related pages

• Columns and Widths — width presets and moving/focusing columns in the tiling strip.
• Arranging Windows — tabs, splits, stacks/rows, and the drag drop-zone cheat sheet.
• Snapping and Pop-out — the gestures that move one window between floating and tiling.
• Keyboard-Shortcuts — the full shortcut table and how to rebind keys.
• MCP-and-AI-Agents — with Allow MCP to arrange the desktop on, an MCP agent can focus, move, size, tile, float, tab and split windows on the browser that holds the lease (get_desktop / arrange_window).