Arc Split View, Notes & Easel Shortcuts

Split View tiles up to four tabs in one window. Adding a pane is Ctrl+Shift+=, removing one is Ctrl+Shift+-, moving focus between panes is Ctrl+Shift with the bracket keys, and Ctrl+Shift with a number jumps straight to a specific pane. Every one of these is Ctrl on macOS, where the rest of the application uses Cmd, and that inconsistency is genuinely confusing rather than a matter of taste. It has to be learned as an exception; there is no rule that predicts it. The likely explanation is that the obvious Cmd+Shift combinations were already assigned by the time Split View shipped, but the reason does not help much when your fingers reach for the wrong modifier. What makes Split View worth the awkwardness is that it is a first-class layout rather than an arrangement of windows. The panes live inside one Arc window, share the sidebar, and persist as a unit — a split you set up for a task is still there when you come back to that Space. Compare the alternative in a conventional browser, which is two windows manually sized to sit beside each other, an arrangement that survives exactly until something else takes focus. Removing a pane with Ctrl+Shift+- does not archive the tab; it returns it to being an ordinary sidebar entry, so dismantling a split is purely a layout change. Notes are documents that live in the sidebar alongside tabs. Ctrl+N creates one; Ctrl+Option+N creates one directly into a split pane, which is the version that matters. A note beside the page it refers to — reading a specification on the left and writing against it on the right, both inside the browser with no application switching — is the actual use case, and opening a note in isolation mostly is not. Because Notes are sidebar items, they pin like anything else, so a note attached to an ongoing project stays exactly where you left it. Easels, on Ctrl+Shift+E, are the least conventional feature Arc ships. An Easel is an infinite canvas that holds text, screenshots and, distinctively, live clips of web pages — a region you select from a site that keeps updating on the Easel as the source changes. That last part has no real equivalent anywhere else. It makes an Easel useful as a lightweight dashboard: prices, statuses, a table from a document that changes, all clipped onto one canvas that stays current without anyone refreshing anything. The common thread across all three is that Arc treats the browser window as a workspace rather than a viewport onto one page at a time. That is a genuinely different premise, and it is the part of Arc most worth trying even now that the browser is in maintenance mode — these features are finished rather than abandoned, and they work today exactly as they will continue to. Split View has a practical limit worth knowing before you plan around it. Four panes is the maximum, and in practice two is where the feature is genuinely comfortable on a laptop display — three becomes cramped, four is really only usable on a large external monitor. Each pane is a full browser view with its own scroll, its own history and its own zoom, so nothing is degraded by the tiling, but the width available to any individual site shrinks proportionally and fixed-width layouts start to break before responsive ones do. Notes and Easels share one property that makes them more useful than their equivalents outside the browser: they are sidebar items, so they pin, they belong to a Space, and they open as instantly as a tab. A note pinned in a project Space is always one keystroke away while you are working in that project and completely absent while you are not — which is the behaviour people try to approximate by keeping a document open in another application and never quite achieve, because that document is equally present no matter what they are doing. There is one caveat to weigh before building a workflow on Notes or Easels specifically. Both store their content inside Arc rather than as files on disk, and Arc is now in maintenance mode following the Atlassian acquisition. Nothing suggests the data is at risk, and no shutdown has been announced — but a note that exists only inside a browser in maintenance is a different proposition from one in a text file, and anything you would be sorry to lose is worth exporting rather than assuming it will always be reachable there. Split View carries no such concern, since it holds nothing of its own beyond an arrangement of ordinary tabs.