Docking Windows
Almost everything in Genie 5 — the Room panel, the stream windows, Inventory, the Mapper, Experience, and the rest — lives in a dock: a tiled arrangement of panes you can rearrange by dragging. There are two ways a dragged window can land: as a tab (sharing a pane with other windows) or as a new section (splitting off its own space). This page walks through both, plus floating, resizing, and getting windows back.
Panels are shown and hidden from the Window menu; your arrangement is remembered automatically, and can be kept as named presets — see Layouts.
Press and hold a panel's tab (or a floating window's title bar) and move the mouse. As you drag, a cross of dock targets appears over whichever pane is under your pointer, and a blue shaded preview shows exactly where the window will land before you commit:
- The ▣ centre target docks the window as a tab in that pane.
- The ▲ ▼ ◀ ▶ arrow targets split the pane, giving the window a new section on that side.
- Release the mouse on a target to dock — or release away from any target to leave the window floating (see below).
The one exception is the main Game window: it anchors the layout and can't be floated out — everything else docks around it.
Drop a window on the ▣ centre target and it joins that pane's tab group — the windows share the same space, with a tab strip along the pane's bottom edge to switch between them. This is how the default layout keeps the stream windows (Logons, Talk, Whispers, Thoughts, Combat) stacked in one pane:
Tab docking is the space-saver: use it for windows you check on demand rather than watch constantly. One thing to know: a background tab quietly collects its text until you click it — if you'd rather never miss a stream, give it its own section instead, or turn on that stream's "Also show this stream in the Main window" toggle (Configuration → Layout tab).
Drop a window on one of the four arrow targets and the pane under your pointer splits: your window gets its own section on that side, always visible in its own space. The blue preview shows exactly the half it will take:
The classic example: the Mapper starts out floating, and dragging it onto the Game window's ▼ bottom target docks it below the game text — the spot Genie 4 users know. Any edge of any pane works the same way, so you can build up multi-column, multi-row arrangements one drop at a time.
To resize sections, drag the divider between them.
A window doesn't have to live in the dock at all:
- Drag it out — release the drag away from any dock target and the window floats in its own OS window (handy for a second monitor).
- Right-click → Float — every window's right-click menu has a Float entry; on a window that's already floating it reads Re-dock and sends it back into the layout.
- Hide Title Bar — a floating window's right-click menu also offers Hide Title Bar for a chromeless, screen-space-saving float; bring it back with Show Title Bar.
To re-dock by hand, drag the floating window back over the main window and use the same dock targets as always.
The ✕ on a tab or title bar closes that window. To bring it back, open the Window menu and toggle it on again — it returns to the spot it occupied before it was closed, even if closing it collapsed the pane it lived in.
Everything on this page is remembered automatically between sessions. Beyond that:
- Layout → Save Layout As… / Load Layout / Manage Layouts… — keep several named arrangements and switch between them.
- Layout → Reset to Default Layout — back to the out-of-the-box three-column arrangement.
- Layout → Windowed Mode (MDI) — prefer free-floating child windows over docked panes entirely, Genie 4-style.
- The Interface — a tour of every panel and the bottom strips.
- The Mapper — the panel you're most likely to be dragging.
- Configuration & Rules — per-window fonts and the "also show in Main" stream toggles.