Profiles

Profiles

A profile is the layout: which panes, how big, and which slot goes in each. Three ship. Switch with:

bothy config set profile editor
bothy                            # or --profile editor for one run

bothy layout prints the Zellij layout a profile would produce, without opening anything.

cockpit — the default

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│            browser — 100% w, 50% h               │
├─────────────────────────────┬────────────────────┤
│        agent  60%           │     side  40%      │
└─────────────────────────────┴────────────────────┘

Supervising an agent working on a repository. The browser is the top half because you are reading what changed; the agent is focused because you are talking to it. The editor is reached through $EDITOR from Yazi, git or the agent rather than sitting in a pane of its own.

editor — three columns

┌──────────────┬──────────────┬──────────────┐
│  editor 40%  │  agent  35%  │  side   25%  │
└──────────────┴──────────────┴──────────────┘

For driving the editor yourself with an agent beside it. The editor slot is the main seat here, and it starts focused. No file browser — the editor's own is closer to hand.

minimal — agent and a shell

┌────────────────────────┬───────────────────┐
│       agent  65%       │     side  35%     │
└────────────────────────┴───────────────────┘

For small screens and SSH sessions, where a file browser costs more rows than it earns. The tab bar is off for the same reason; the status bar stays, because it is the only on-screen reminder of Zellij's modal keys.

Writing your own

Profiles are TOML. Copy one out of profiles/ into ~/.config/bothy/profiles/, change it, and name it in your config.

name        = "wide"
description = "Browser down one side"

[[rows]]
panes = [
    { slot = "browser", size = "30%" },
    { slot = "agent", name = "agent", focus = true },
]

rows stack top to bottom; several panes in one row sit side by side. A pane either names a slot — browser, agent, editor, mux, terminal — or names nothing and gets a plain shell. Exactly one pane should have focus = true.

The three-pane invariant is about capability, not about your layout. bothy reports panes as available when the profile renders and the multiplexer builds what it describes; a two-pane profile of your own is fine, and bothy doctor will tell you what it got (ADR-017).