Guide·02 of 10·Part of Switch
A layout
Side by side, saved worlds, positions, displays, and undo.
01·The first minute
01link
Put two apps side by side
lodeMBHold lode and press two letters before you let go. The second arrives beside the first. Three make columns. Release, and the arrangement stands.
NotesBrowserTerminalCalendarMailTwo apps you use together
02·When you are ready
02link
Save a world, and bring it back
lode'⇧WA breath is a saved layout. lode ' then a shifted letter saves everything standing at that letter. lode ' then the letter restores it, relaunching apps that are not running. lode ' ' updates the latest one.
MailBrowserA layout worth keeping
03link
Go back
lode←Undo the last placement: a summon, a beside, a flip, a breath. Redo with →. One timeline across every display.
MailBrowserNotesMail and the browser, side by side
04link
Jump by position
lode3The windows in the layout are numbered left to right, top to bottom. lode and a digit goes to that one. 9 is always the last. Hold lode alone and the badges show the numbers.
Hold lode, then 3
05Few know thislink
Fill the display with any window
lode0The focused window fills the display and everything already placed parks. ⇧0 joins it beside instead. This is also how a window Lodestar did not open becomes one it manages.
Hold lode, then 0
Hold lode, then \
07link
Send a window to the other display
lode]The focused window moves to the next display, maximized there. [ goes the other way. Shift arrives beside.
Hold lode, then ]
08link
Slide a window to a position
lode⇧2A shifted digit moves the focused window to that position, shifting the others along.
Hold lode, then shift 2
03·The fine print
What nobody finds by pressing keys
- Every monitor owns its own layout, with its own members, orientation, and numbers. Your verbs act on the display under the pointer, or the one with keyboard focus if you prefer.
- Unplug a monitor and its members quietly park. Plug it back in and the arrangement returns, remembered by the monitor's hardware identity, minus anything you placed elsewhere while it was gone.
- Breath paths are prefix-free: a path resolves the instant it matches, so nothing deeper can be created past it, and binding a prefix of an existing path is refused.
- Inside a breath chain, ⌫ arms deletion. The next path you type is deleted rather than visited. ⌫ again disarms.
- A breath captures every display and restores each member to its own monitor, or to the active one if that monitor is unplugged.
- Reaching a parked window by an outside road, ⌘Tab or the Dock, brings it back where it was.
04·Why
Why it works this way
A specific window is instance-bound. The whole point is to pin this window out of ten, and a window cannot be freely recreated, so layouts carry the real technical risk and were built last, on the bedrock of the letters. They earn their place because past the motor floor the remaining gains are structural: eliminating a navigation beats accelerating one by any margin. On the day the chord shipped, a side-by-side arrangement went from 2.1 seconds to 757 milliseconds.
05·Settings
The settings behind this page
Read from the schema Lodestar itself emits. The settings window shows the same rows, and each wears the path it writes.
gestures.breathsbooleanlode ', saved layouts
$ lodestar config set gestures.breaths truegestures.index-jumpbooleanlode 1…9 jump, ⇧1…9 slide
$ lodestar config set gestures.index-jump truegestures.maximizebooleanlode 0 fill the display with the focused window, ⇧0 beside
$ lodestar config set gestures.maximize truegestures.flip-orientationbooleanlode \, flip the layout axis
$ lodestar config set gestures.flip-orientation truegestures.display-movebooleanlode [ and ], move across displays
$ lodestar config set gestures.display-move truegestures.layout-undobooleanlode ← undo, lode → redo
$ lodestar config set gestures.layout-undo trueapp.active-displaypointer · focusHow the active display is chosen.
$ lodestar config set app.active-display …