Docs / Tiling & tabs

Panes that tile themselves.

QuorumTerm lays panes out the way a tiling window manager does: splits follow the space, dividers drag, and the layout survives restarts. Tabs group work; each tab can run a different layout mode.

BSP splits

⌘D splits the focused pane along its longer axis, so repeated splits produce a balanced binary-space-partitioned grid instead of ever-thinner slivers. Panes render in scissored rectangles with hairline dividers and a focus ring on the active pane. Click any pane to focus it; closing a pane collapses its branch of the split tree. The split-tree logic is unit-tested.

  • Dividers are draggable — grab one to resize both sides; ratios persist per tab.
  • Panes can be pulled out into their own tab (break-pane) or moved into another tab (move-pane) from the palette or the CLI.
  • Dropped files land in the pane under the pointer, shell-quoted like iTerm2 does it.

Tabs

  • TNew tab (an agent tab when the tab is in agent mode)
  • WClose pane / tab
  • ⌘⇧[Previous tab
  • ⌘⇧]Next tab
  • 1–9Jump to tab by index

Tabs title themselves from the checked-out branch, else the working directory name, and can be renamed from the palette. A worktree environment tab gets a marker glyph plus the branch's CI verdict from the last GitHub status fetch.

Agent mode

Every tab has a layout mode: default (free BSP tiling) or agent— a layout tuned for one primary agent session with a side column for support panes. Switch the active tab's mode from the palette (Agent Mode / Default Mode) or the CLI (quorum-term mode agent). In agent mode, split adds an agent side pane instead of a free split.

The sidebar

The left sidebar shows every tab with its nested agent rows — one row per detected agent pane, with a live state dot (green working, amber idle, red blocked) and the agent's project directory. Clicking a row focuses that exact pane, in whatever tab it lives. Toggle the sidebar from the palette when you want every pixel for the grid.

Pane notes

Any pane can carry a note — Add Note to Panein the palette — for the "which experiment was this?" problem when a dozen agents run at once. Notes are editable and clearable, and they persist with the session.

Session restore

The full layout — tab order, titles, modes, split trees with their ratios, focus, and each pane's working directory — is written atomically to ~/.quorum/quorum-term-session.json on every change and rebuilt on launch. Panes that were running Claude Code or Codex are respawned by resuming that agent's most recent sessionin the pane's cwd (claude --resume / codex resume) rather than dropping you at a bare prompt. Both behaviors are configurable (restore_session, resume_agents).