Splits, windows, and tabs

Splits

Or with the <C-w> chord:

Both forms work — held-Ctrl through both keys is equivalent to release-Ctrl-then-letter, the same way vim handles them.

Window navigation

The directional commands always step exactly one column/row at a time — they never skip past nearer windows. Within the target strip, the window that contains the cursor's screen position is selected. If the cursor sits exactly on a split boundary, the window above (or to the left) of the boundary wins.

Equalising splits

<C-w>= rebalances every split node in the current tab so each side gets space proportional to how many same-axis leaves it contains. Concretely: if you have three columns at the top level, each one gets ≈1/3 of the width regardless of how many rows are nested inside. Then within each column, the rows equalise among themselves.

Maximising a window

Each pushes the active window as large as the layout allows along one axis, shrinking its neighbours toward the minimum — while leaving the other axis untouched. So <C-w>_ grows a stacked window to fill the column without disturbing the column widths, and <C-w>| widens a side-by-side window without changing row heights. <C-w>= puts everything back to equal.

Resizing splits manually

Resizing moves the boundary the current window shares with the neighbour on that side — growing the current window shrinks the neighbour, and vice-versa. :resize works on the nearest horizontal split (stacked windows); :vertical resize on the nearest vertical split (side-by-side). If there's no split along that axis, the command does nothing.

Minimum sizes. No pane ever drops below 10% of its split. Within that, shrinking a side has soft stops: a single :vertical resize won't take the shrinking pane below the next tier down — 20, then 10, then 5 columns — so a big shrink stops at the tier rather than collapsing the neighbour. Small adjustments within a tier are free. Horizontal panes always keep at least one content row plus their statusline.

Tabs

Keymap:

<C-w>T peels the active window out of its current tab, collapsing the split it leaves behind into the sibling, and drops it into a fresh tab placed right after the current one. It's a no-op when the window is already the only one in its tab.

A tab line appears at the top of the screen when there are 2+ tabs.

Per-window statusline

Every window has its own status row at the bottom of its rect — buffer name, dirty flag, cursor row:col. The active window's statusline is highlighted with a brighter background and shows the mode badge (NORMAL, INSERT, etc.); inactive ones are muted.

The file name is shown relative to the working directory when the file lives under it, and as its full path otherwise (files outside the cwd aren't shown with a ../../ prefix). Press <C-g> to print the full absolute path (plus line count and position) in the command line. Long names are truncated from the left so the basename stays visible.

Split layout details

The split tree is a binary tree of horizontal / vertical splits with ratios. Splits are stored on each Tab. A Window is a leaf — buffer + cursor + viewport + last-known render size.

After every split / close, the tab's tree is rewritten:

• :split replaces the focused leaf with Split { axis: H, ratio: 0.5, first: new_win, second: old_win } — new window goes on top.
• :vsplit is the same but with axis: V, new window on the left.
• :close removes the leaf and collapses the parent split into the sibling.

<C-w>= walks the tree and resets every ratio based on the same-axis leaf count of each subtree, as described above.