Panes on the boards overlay start where they land. Dragging four of them into a sensible arrangement gets old fast, so you mostly don’t: you say where they should go.
By hand
- Move — drag a pane’s title bar.
- Resize — drag the tab in its bottom-right corner, or drag the double-arrow grip in the title bar to change height alone.
- Resize from the keyboard — focus that height grip and use ↑/↓; hold Shift for finer steps, or press Enter to fit the pane on screen.
- Rescue everything — Fit panes on the toolbar, or ⌘⇧F, pulls every pane on the board fully back onto the display.
⌘⇧F only works in Edit mode, and a focused pad or browser pane swallows it — click an empty part of the canvas first. The Fit panes button never has that problem, which is why it’s pinned to a fixed spot on the toolbar.
By voice
With the overlay open, you can just ask. Out of the box the assistant can move a pane to a rough position, align panes to an edge, and lay them out in a grid or a row:
“Put the notes pane in the top left.” “Line these up along the left.” “Lay this board out in a grid.”
Panes are addressed by name, so rename them (double-click the title) if you want to be precise about which one you mean.
Pane Snap
For anything more exact, install Pane Snap from Settings → Add-ons. It’s a small add-on with no interface of its own — it exists purely to give the assistant a better vocabulary for layout. Once it’s on:
Tile the whole board with a template
| Template | What you get |
|---|---|
| grid | a near-square grid |
| columns | equal side-by-side columns |
| rows | equal stacked rows |
| main-side | one big pane on the left, the rest stacked on the right |
| focus-one | one pane nearly full, the rest in a thin strip down the right |
Say “tile everything in a grid on this board”, “side by side”, “main and side layout”, “focus one pane”. For the last two you can name which pane gets the big slot.
Snap one pane to a zone
Halves (left, right, top, bottom), thirds (left, centre and right third; top and bottom third), quadrants (top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right), plus maximize and center. “Put the notes pane on the left half.” “Move Draft to the bottom right.”
Shuffle and tidy
- “Rotate the panes” — every pane moves into a neighbour’s slot, wrapping round. The positions don’t change; only which pane sits in each. Say “rotate them back” to go the other way.
- “Tidy this board up” — de-overlaps everything and snaps it to a neat grid, keeping roughly the order you’d read it in.
Save an arrangement
- “Save this arrangement as Research.”
- “Lay it out like Research.”
A saved layout stores each pane’s name and position — not its contents, and not the panes themselves. Re-applying it matches saved names to the panes currently on the board, skips any that are gone, and leaves anything not in the layout where it is. Saving over an existing name replaces it.
Screenshot pending: overlay-arranged.png
What it’s allowed to do
Pane Snap asks for two things, both marked stays on your Mac:
| Permission | What it means |
|---|---|
| Arrange overlay panes | Move, tile and resize the panes on your Clabrate overlay boards |
| Store data on your device | Save data in its own private space on your Mac — here, your saved layouts |
It only ever moves panes on Clabrate’s own canvas. It doesn’t touch other apps’ windows, it can’t create or close panes, and it makes no network requests of any kind — it has no permission to. Every position it asks for is clamped by Clabrate to somewhere on screen, so it can’t put a pane where you couldn’t have dragged one.
Note: Don’t confuse this with Window layouts (Settings → Window layouts), which snaps real macOS windows — Safari, your editor, Mail — into halves and thirds of your actual screen. That’s a different add-on for a different job. Pane Snap only arranges the overlay’s own panes.
Common questions
I asked it to tile the board and nothing happened. The overlay has to be open — the layout tools only exist while it is. Check it’s up, and that you’re not in Ambient mode.
It says it can’t find the pane I named. It matches on the pane’s name, and the error usually lists the panes on the board. Rename the pane to something you’d actually say out loud.
It arranged the wrong board. These act on the active board only. Switch boards first (“switch to the Research board”), then arrange.
Do I need Pane Snap? Not for basics — moving a pane, aligning, a grid or a row all work without it. Pane Snap adds the templates, thirds and quadrants, rotation, tidy, and saved layouts.
Can I bind a layout to a key? Not today. Layouts are voice-and-assistant only; the only overlay chords are the overlay toggle (⌘⇧O by default, rebindable in Settings → Keys) and ⌘⇧F.