Tabs & Split View

Open many things at once. Pin the ones you keep coming back to. Split the workspace into panes.

Tabs

Every note, view, search, project, journal entry, or settings panel opens in a tab. Tabs persist across app restarts when Restore Session is on (default; see Settings → General).

Tab Bar

Across the top of the app. Drag to reorder. Drag onto a pane edge to split.

Tabs share the width of the bar evenly. Widen the window and they grow, up to a comfortable maximum; open more tabs, or narrow the window, and they compress — first the close button tucks away, then the title, leaving just the icon. Once tabs reach that icon-only minimum the bar scrolls sideways instead of shrinking further: scroll over it with a trackpad or mouse wheel, or use the chevrons that appear at either end. The active tab is always scrolled into view, so opening a new tab never leaves it hidden off the end. That scroll animates once per tab you activate — the chevrons appearing part-way through it no longer restart the animation, and a tab already fully in view is left where it is. If your system is set to reduce motion (macOS Reduce motion, Windows Animation effects off, or the equivalent on Linux), the bar jumps straight to the active tab instead of sliding, and the chevrons and wheel scrolling stop animating too — the tab is still brought into view either way. Changing the setting takes effect on the next scroll; no restart needed. The + button stays pinned at the end of the bar while it scrolls.

There is no limit on how many tabs you can have open, and memrynote never closes one for you: use the tab context menu (Close others, Close to the right) when the bar gets long.

Tab Context Menu

Right-click any tab:

• Close
• Close others
• Close to the right
• Pin / unpin
• Duplicate
• Move to new window (where supported)
• Copy link to this tab

Pinning

Pin a tab to keep it at the front of the bar. Pinned tabs:

• Show only their icon (compact)
• Don't close on middle-click
• Survive bulk-close commands
• Restore first on app launch

Useful for: today's journal, your "now" note, the shared project.

Opening Items

Single-clicking a note, view, search result, or sidebar item opens a permanent tab. If that item is already open, memrynote focuses the existing tab instead of creating another copy.

Inactive workspace surfaces stay unloaded until first use. Inbox remains ready on cold open, while heavier surfaces such as Tasks, Calendar, Graph, and the right-side Agent/Day Panel mount when the user opens them. This keeps startup memory tied to the visible workspace instead of every possible feature surface.

Opening a Second Copy

When you want the same item open twice — two places in a long note, a reference you keep alongside your work — ask for a new tab explicitly from the sidebar:

Gesture	Result
⌘ (macOS) / Ctrl click	Opens another tab and focuses it
⌘+⇧ click	Opens another tab in the background
Middle-click	Opens another tab in the background
Right-click → Open in New Tab	Opens another tab and focuses it

Each copy is an independent tab: close, pin, or move one and the other stays put. Edits made in either appear in both.

Whole-app views — Home, Inbox, Calendar, Tasks, Journal, Graph, and Tags — stay single-instance, since a second copy would show exactly the same thing. These gestures focus the tab that already exists; the background gestures leave your focus where it is.

Mouse Navigation

Mouse Back and Forward side buttons move through tab focus history across the whole window, including split panes. Back returns to the previously focused tab; Forward replays the next tab after a Back action. Opening or selecting another tab starts a new history path.

Split View

Drag a tab to the left, right, top, or bottom edge of the window to open a second pane.

Open to the Side

Right-click any sidebar item and choose Open to the Side to split the current pane and open that item in the new pane in one step. The new pane takes focus, so you can start reading or editing straight away.

The item always lands in the pane that gesture created — even when the item is already open in another pane (you get a second, independent copy), and even if something else takes focus while the split is being drawn. Use it to put a note beside a canvas, or a project beside your journal.

Drop Zones

When dragging a tab, the workspace highlights drop zones:

• Center — same pane
• Left / right — split horizontally
• Top / bottom — split vertically
• Beyond the edge — new window

Drop in a zone to create or move into a pane.

Resizing Panes

• Drag the divider between panes
• Double-click the divider to reset to default 50/50

Resize ratios persist across sessions.

Pane Navigation (Chord)

Action	Shortcut
Split right	⌘+\
Split down	⌘+⇧+\
Close split pane	⌘+⌥+W
Focus right pane	⌘+K, ⌘+→
Focus left pane	⌘+K, ⌘+←
Toggle maximize pane	⌘+K, M

A chord indicator briefly flashes when the prefix is active. See Keyboard Shortcuts for the full list.

Tab Hover Preview

Hovering a tab shows a thumbnail card preview after a short delay — handy when you have many tabs of the same icon.

Tab Persistence

If Restore Session is on, the entire tab and split layout restores on app launch:

• Tab order
• Pinned state
• Split layout and ratios
• Active tab per pane

The layout is written only when one of those things actually changes. Activity that leaves the layout alone — a note picking up and losing its modified dot, moving back and forward inside a tab — no longer triggers a rewrite. Quitting still writes the current layout either way, so nothing is lost by the skipped writes.

If the layout can't be saved

Session layout is stored in the app's local browser storage, which has a size limit. A very large session — many open tabs, several split panes, tabs holding a lot of view state — can hit that limit, and once it does the layout stops being saved.

memrynote now tells you when that happens: a toast reads "Your open tabs are no longer being saved", and explains that the session is too large to store and may not be restored the next time you open the app. Close some tabs to get back under the limit; the next save after that succeeds on its own and the warning does not come back.

Previously the failure was silent — the app kept running normally and you only found out at the next launch, when the restored layout turned out to be stale.

If the last save on quit fails

The layout is written one last time while memrynote closes (⌘Q, or closing the window). If storage is full at that moment, that final write is refused too — the tabs you had when you quit are lost, and what comes back is whatever was stored before them.

A toast is no use while the window is going away, so memrynote records the failure and reports it at the next launch instead: "Your last session was not saved when Memry closed", along with the reason. It appears once, on the first launch after the failed quit, so you know the restored layout is older than the one you left.

Modified Indicator

A small dot appears on a tab title when there are unsaved changes (rare — memrynote auto-saves). On a compressed tab the dot takes the close button's place, so unsaved work stays visible. Closing a modified tab triggers a flush before close.

Canvases in Tabs

Canvases open as tabs too, so you can keep a board in one pane and a note in the other. Note that a note open in a visible pane is edited there, not on the canvas card — see Cards & Links.

Links in Split Panes

Each pane handles its own links. Clicking an external link or a [[wiki link]] in either pane opens it from that pane, and closing one pane leaves the other pane's links working.

See Also

• Folder View — opens in a tab like everything else
• Canvas Overview
• Keyboard Shortcuts