xplit

xplit splits one terminal window into shells side by side or stacked, and splits those again. There is no prefix key, no status bar, no configuration and no sessions to manage, so the only thing between you and the shells is a dim one-character divider. It is for the moment you want a second shell next to the first without reaching for tmux and its keybindings, and typing xplit again is how you split.

It runs on Linux and is built against GNOME Terminal.

Install

Debian and Ubuntu

Add the Excelano apt repository once:

curl -fsSL https://excelano.com/apt/setup.sh | sudo sh

Then install it, so apt upgrade keeps it current:

sudo apt install xplit

Both amd64 and arm64 packages ship with every release. The package recommends wl-clipboard or xclip, which xplit uses for copying and pasting.

crates.io

cargo install xplit

Usage

xplit                  # two panes side by side
xplit down             # two panes stacked top and bottom
xplit solo             # one pane, ready to split
xplit claude           # a shell on the left, claude on the right
xplit down htop        # a shell on top, htop below
xplit tray             # a shell, with a five-row tray across the bottom
xplit tray htop        # the same, with htop in the tray
xplit hide             # inside xplit: fold away the pane you typed it in
xplit focus            # inside xplit: fold away every pane but this one, or bring them back
xplit -- down          # run a program that happens to be called down

Each pane runs $SHELL (or /bin/bash when it is unset) with TERM=xterm-256color, unless it was opened with a command, in which case it runs that command. When whatever a pane runs ends, by exit, Ctrl+D or anything else, the pane closes and the pane it was split from takes back its space. When the last pane closes, xplit puts the terminal back as it found it and exits. Resizing the window resizes every pane.

Inside xplit

Typed in one of its own panes, xplit does not start a second copy. It asks the xplit it is running in to split the pane you typed in: that pane stays on the left (or on top, with down), and the new pane opens beside it with the focus, in the directory and with the environment of the shell you typed in. A command after the verb runs in the new pane, so xplit claude from inside a pane opens Claude Code next to it. Any pane can be split again, in either direction, so a screen can hold as many panes as fit; xplit refuses a split that would leave a half too small to use. xplit solo refuses because you are already in xplit.

xplit tray adds a tray: a pane five rows tall across the full width of the screen, under every other pane however they are split. A screen has at most one. Typed again while a tray exists, xplit tray moves the focus to it (bringing it back if it is hidden), and with a command it says the screen already has one. The tray cannot be split, and when every other pane has closed it takes over the screen.

xplit hide folds the pane you typed it in down to a dim dashed line (┆ or ┄) along its edge, and the pane beside it takes the space. What runs in a hidden pane keeps running at the size it had, so it never sees a resize. Alt+arrow toward the dashed line, or a click on it, brings the pane back with the focus. When both halves of a split are hidden they fold into one line and come back together. The last visible pane cannot be hidden.

xplit focus hides every pane except the one you typed it in, the tray included, so that pane fills the screen with the others folded into dashed lines along its edges. Typed again while every other pane is hidden, it brings back every hidden pane at once; Alt+arrow or a click still brings them back one fold at a time. The tray cannot be focused alone.

To have a window that starts in xplit without changing every terminal, give GNOME Terminal a second profile (Preferences, then the + beside Profiles) whose Command tab runs xplit solo as a custom command instead of the shell, and open it from the new-tab menu or with gnome-terminal --profile=<name>. It looks like an ordinary shell until you type xplit.

Keys

Alt+arrow moves to the nearest pane on that side, and where several panes border it, to the one level with the cursor. When there is no pane in that direction, the key goes to the program in the focused pane, so Alt+arrows still reach the shell whenever they have nowhere to move. Every other key goes to the focused pane unchanged, including Ctrl+C, Ctrl+Z, Esc and bracketed paste. Only the focused pane shows a cursor.

Mouse and copying

xplit handles the mouse itself, so a selection stays inside the pane it started in. Drag to select; the selection stays inside the pane, dragging past its top or bottom edge scrolls the pane to extend the selection, and soft-wrapped lines come back joined. The selection stays on its text as output scrolls the pane, except in a pane whose scrollback is full, where new output clears it. Copy it to the clipboard with a right-click, or with Ctrl+C while the selection is showing; with nothing selected, Ctrl+C goes to the shell as an interrupt as usual. Finishing a drag also sets the primary selection, and a middle-click pastes the primary selection into the pane under the mouse. Typing, clicking or resizing clears the selection.

Clicking a pane focuses it. The wheel scrolls the pane under the mouse through its scrollback, and in a full-screen program without mouse support it sends arrow keys, so less and man scroll with it. Programs that ask for the mouse, such as htop and vim with mouse=a, receive clicks, drags and the wheel at the right place in their pane. To select text in one of those, hold Ctrl while dragging. Shift+drag still makes GNOME Terminal's own selection, which runs across both panes.

Copying and pasting go through wl-copy and wl-paste under Wayland and xclip under X11, from the wl-clipboard and xclip packages. Without them, or in a session with neither display (such as over ssh), selecting still works and copying does nothing.

Scrollback

Each pane keeps the last 10,000 lines that scrolled off its top. While a pane is scrolled back, its cursor is hidden, a dim +N in its top-right corner says how many lines back you are, and the view holds still as new output arrives. Any key other than Alt+PageUp and Alt+PageDown returns the pane to the bottom and goes to the shell as usual. Full-screen programs such as vim, less and htop have no scrollback of their own, so while one is running the two keys go to it instead.

Behavior to know about

xplit reports mouse movement to programs only while a button is held, so a program that tracks the pointer as it hovers sees no hover events. The focused pane's window title and cursor shape are passed on to GNOME Terminal, and a bell in any pane rings it. Programs that query the terminal (for its cursor position or its identity) get no answer and fall back to their defaults.