How to Open Split View in Arc (Ctrl+Shift+=)

Ctrl+Shift+= adds a Split View pane in Arc, tiling another tab beside the current one. Ctrl+Shift+- removes a pane, Ctrl+Shift+[ and Ctrl+Shift+] move focus between panes, and Ctrl+Shift with a number jumps straight to a specific one. Up to four tabs can share a split. **Note the modifier, because this is where most people give up.** These are Ctrl combinations on macOS, not Cmd — the only significant corner of Arc that departs from the Mac convention the rest of the application follows. Someone reaching for Cmd+Shift+= gets nothing, concludes Split View has no keyboard support, and goes back to dragging tabs with the mouse. There is no rule that predicts the exception; it simply has to be learned. The probable cause is that the obvious Cmd+Shift combinations were already assigned by the time the feature shipped. **The Command Bar is the other route in, and it is more flexible.** Pressing Cmd+T and typing 'Add Right Split', 'Add Left Split', 'Add Top Split' or 'Add Bottom Split' places the new pane where you want it rather than wherever the keyboard shortcut decides. When the arrangement matters — reference material on the left, work on the right, in that order — the Command Bar gets there directly instead of adding a pane and then rearranging it. **Split View is a layout, not a window arrangement.** The panes live inside one Arc window, share a sidebar, and persist as a unit belonging to the Space you built them in. Return to that Space tomorrow and the split is still there. The conventional alternative — two browser windows manually sized to sit side by side — survives exactly until another application takes focus and something gets buried. That persistence is what makes a split worth setting up for an ongoing task rather than only for a moment. **Removing a pane does not archive the tab.** Ctrl+Shift+- collapses the pane and returns its tab to being an ordinary sidebar entry, still open, still where you left it. Dismantling a split is purely a layout change, so there is no reason to hesitate over it — you are not closing anything. **One thing to watch on narrow panes.** Arc remembers page zoom per site, not per tab, so a pane inherits whatever zoom level you set for that domain in a full-width window. A site that looked fine at 110% across the whole screen can be cramped at a third of it. Cmd+- inside the pane fixes it, but the setting then applies to that site everywhere, which is occasionally the wrong trade. Responsive sites usually handle the narrow width on their own; fixed-width ones are the ones that need the adjustment. **How many panes are actually useful.** Four is the maximum Arc allows, but two is where the feature is comfortable on a laptop screen. Three is cramped, and four is really only workable on a large external display. Each pane is a complete browser view — its own scroll position, its own history, its own zoom — so nothing about them is a reduced version of a normal tab. The constraint is purely horizontal space, and it bites fixed-width sites well before responsive ones.