Tabs Splits Panels

Tabs, Splits & Panels

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Arrange multiple terminals with tabs and splits, move focus between panels, and use Quake drop-down mode.

On macOS, the app chords below use Cmd in place of Ctrl (Quake stays Ctrl+backquote on every platform). See Keyboard-Shortcuts to remap any of them.

Tabs vs splits

A tab is a separate session in the tab strip. A split divides one tab into multiple terminal panels that share the same tab. Use tabs to keep unrelated work apart, and splits to see related terminals side by side.

Working with tabs

• Open a new tab: click the + button at the end of the tab strip, or press Ctrl+Shift+T (new_session) to open the session launcher and pick a shell, Copilot, or a saved SSH profile.
• Switch tabs: Ctrl+Tab / Ctrl+Shift+Tab move to the next / previous tab; Alt+1 … Alt+9 (switch_tab_1 … switch_tab_9) jump straight to tab N.
• Rename a tab: double-click the tab's title, type a new name, then press Enter to commit or Escape to cancel. The old title is selected when editing begins, so typing replaces it. This works for terminal and Copilot tabs alike.
• Reorder tabs: open the sidebar with Ctrl+Shift+B (toggle_sidebar) and drag a tab up or down to a new position.

Creating & focusing splits

• Split the current panel: Ctrl+Shift++ splits to the right (split_right) and Ctrl+Shift+- splits downward (split_down), mirroring Windows Terminal.
• Move focus between panels: Alt+← / Alt+→ / Alt+↑ / Alt+↓.
• Cycle focus: Ctrl+Shift+[ (previous) and Ctrl+Shift+] (next).
• Equalize sizes: Ctrl+Shift+Z (equalize_splits) resets all splits in the tab to equal proportions.
• Maximize the focused panel: Alt+Enter (toggle_maximize) zooms it to fill the tab; press again to restore.

Drag a split's divider to resize the panels on either side.

Focus a panel by number

Press Ctrl+1 … Ctrl+9 to jump straight to the Nth split panel in the active tab. Panels are numbered by screen position — row-major, top-left to bottom-right. If there is no panel at that index, the key falls through to the terminal, so apps that use Ctrl+<digit> keep working when you are not split.

Swap panels

Hold Alt and left-drag one panel onto another to swap their contents. The layout topology stays the same — only the two panels' terminals trade places. The drop target is highlighted with an accent border while you drag.

Focus follows mouse

Set focus-follows-mouse = true in the config to focus whichever panel the mouse is over, without clicking. It is off by default.

Quake drop-down mode

Quake mode turns WispTerm into a drop-down terminal toggled with a global hotkey. The toggle_quake binding (Ctrl+backquote, the ` key, registered system-wide) hides or shows the same window while preserving terminal state, and WispTerm remembers the Quake window's size and position across restarts.

Quake mode is off by default. Enable it with quake-mode = true in the config, or --quake-mode true on the command line.

Closing tabs & splits

Ctrl+Shift+W (close_panel_or_tab) closes the focused panel, or the tab when it is the last panel. When a panel is running a full-screen TUI (anything that switched to the alternate screen, like vim or htop), WispTerm asks for confirmation first. Turn this off with confirm-close-running-program = false (it is on by default).

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See also: Keyboard-Shortcuts · Getting-Started