Tabs and panes

Every document, asset or view you open in EtherPK lands as a tab. Tabs sit in panes - on a desktop you can split the editor area into more than one pane by dragging a tab to an edge, and each pane has its own row of tabs. On a phone there's one strip of tabs across the top, and a chevron that lists them all when they overflow.

The rest of this page is about keeping that lot under control.

Giving a graph its own colour

If you keep more than one graph open, or just want to know at a glance which one you are in, give it a colour. Open the graph's settings (the cog in the toolbar on a desktop, or Settings at the foot of the left drawer on a phone) and pick a Toolbar colour. On a desktop it colours the bar of buttons above the panes - the sidebar toggles, docs, keyboard shortcuts, settings and tasks. On a phone that bar is not there, so the colour goes on the strip of tabs across the top instead. The buttons on either bar keep the theme's own styling, so they stay readable over whatever you choose.

It is one of the graph's settings, so it is shared by every member of a synced graph and is the same colour in light and dark themes - the point is to tell graphs apart, and a colour that changed with the theme would not do that. Use theme colour in the same dialog puts the bar back to the theme's own surface.

The tab menu

Right-click a tab on a desktop, or press and hold one on a phone, and you get a menu. A document tab offers the document's own rows first (favourite, rename, delete), and every tab offers these:

A row that wouldn't do anything isn't shown - the last tab in a pane has nothing to its right, so that row stays away.

On a graph kept in your own folder, a document tab has one more row at the end: Copy full file path to clipboard. It gives you the file's path on this computer, ready to hand to an AI agent or another editor. The first time you use it on a device it asks where the folder is, because browser restrictions mean EtherPK knows the folder's name but not where it lives; after that it just copies. See Your Notes In Your Own Folder for the details. The demo graph has no such row: it lives inside the browser, not in a folder you can reach.

Pinning a tab

Pin the two or three things you keep coming back to and they stay put.

Pinning is part of your layout, so like the rest of it (which pane is where, which sidebar is open) it's per device: it doesn't sync, and it doesn't travel with an export. Pin what suits the screen you're on.

Closing tabs in bulk

"Left" and "right" mean the order the tabs sit in within their own pane, as they are now - drag a tab somewhere else and the rows follow it. If you've split the editor, the other pane is a different place, and these rows never reach into it. A new document opens in the pane you were last working in.

Close other tabs in this pane is the everyday one. Close other tabs in all panes appears once the editor is split and clears every pane in the editor area apart from the tab you asked from - and, as above, apart from anything pinned. It never touches the sidebars, so the document tree, references and tasks stay where they are.

There's also a × on each row of the overflow list, for when the tab you want rid of is one you can't see.