Panel layout

What it is

The main window is built from a handful of side panels: your projects, your sessions, the mind map, the workflow builder, the session browser and the file explorer. Before this, each had its own separate switch, and an agent had no way to rearrange the screen at all.

Panel layout gives all of them one set of controls, usable from Settings and from an agent. It covers four things:

• Hide a panel, so it stops taking space.
• Move a panel to the other side of the window.
• Reorder the panels on one side.
• Resize a panel. The same width control works for the other screens that already have a drag handle — the Team Chat channel list, the Bug Intake sessions rail, the writer assistant, the tasks list, the AI browser chat, the two Help Desk columns, the Mission Control tasks panel, the Drive and Sheets lists — and for the minimum height of the message box.

Beyond those, almost any named part of the screen can be hidden by name — that is the "hide any region" part, and it is mostly for agents. The things you must always be able to reach can never be hidden: approval and permission prompts, the inbox and alerts, Settings, the top bar, the main work area, and the reset controls themselves.

With no changes, the app looks and behaves exactly as it always has.

Where to find it

Settings → Appearance → Sidebar → Panel layout. The card lists the six movable panels, each with a show/hide switch, a Left/Right choice, two arrows to move it toward the window edge or toward the work area, and a width box. A More sizes fold holds the other resizable regions. Anything an agent has hidden by name is listed under Hidden regions with a Show button. A line at the bottom tells you who changed the layout last — you, the command line, or a named agent session — and when.

The card also has Undo (puts back the layout from before the last change; pressing it again redoes the change) and Reset layout.

The phone layout is not affected. The layout belongs to the desktop screen of the main window, so a browser opened at desktop width (which shows that same screen) shows your arrangement too; pop-out windows keep their own screens.

How it behaves

Changes appear at once, in every window you have open — there is nothing to restart — and they are saved, so the layout is still there after you quit and reopen the app.

When something goes wrong — Reset

There are four ways back to the standard layout, and none of them needs a visible panel:

• The Reset layout button in the card.
• The keyboard shortcut Alt+Ctrl+Shift+L (hold Alt, Ctrl and Shift, then press L). You can change it in Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts.
• A command that works from outside the app — see below.
• The --reset-layout launch option (or the environment variable AMC_RESET_LAYOUT=1), which restores the standard layout as the app starts. If Omniscio is already running, launching it again with --reset-layout resets the running copy; the environment variable only works when the app starts fresh. This is the one to use if the screen is too broken to click anything.

Reset puts back only what the layout itself changed. If you dragged a panel's width yourself after the layout set one, your width stays. It never touches the choice of putting the sidebars on the left or the right.

The layout also steps aside in Safe Mode, and the card has an on/off switch. Turning the layer off (or Safe Mode) puts the panels back on their standard sides and in their standard order, shows every region that was hidden by name, and drops the sizes the layout pinned itself — without deleting your saved arrangement; turning it back on restores it. One thing stays as it is: a hide or width the layout already wrote into a panel's own setting (the Projects and Sessions lists' hide switches and the column widths), because that setting is where the value lives and other parts of the app read it too. Reset layout puts those back.

Limits worth knowing

• A very large layout is refused with a message rather than saved half-way; show some hidden regions first.
• Hiding a large region also hides what is inside it. The protected list covers the containers that hold approvals, the inbox and Settings, but if you hide something big and cannot find what you need, reset.
• Pop-out windows keep their own screens; the layout applies to the main window.
• This does not restyle or rebuild the lists inside the panels — for that, use custom CSS, or the full-window custom interface.

For agents

Everything the card does is available over the app's local command line on http://127.0.0.1:19519, with the usual bearer token:

Call	What it does
GET /layout	Every panel with its side, position, size and whether it is hidden; the hidden regions; who changed it last; whether Undo is available.
GET /layout/panels?q=	The panels plus every region name that may be hidden, filtered by q.
PATCH /layout	Apply changes keyed by panel or region name: {"changes": {"sidebar-sessions-list": {"side": "right"}}}. All or nothing.
PATCH /layout/panels/:name	The same for one panel or region.
POST /layout/reset · POST /layout/undo	Back to standard · back one step.
POST /layout/enable · POST /layout/disable	Turn the layer on or off; the saved layout is kept.

A change for a panel can carry hidden (true/false), side (left or right), index (position from the window edge, 0 is against the edge) and size (pixels, or null to clear a size the layout itself pinned). Names are the screen's own data-ui-anchor tags, so the same name you would use in custom CSS works here. A name that does not exist, or is malformed, is refused with a plain sentence that says what is possible — and nothing in that request is applied.

Send changes together. The app limits how many changing requests one caller can make in a minute (about four), so put every change you want in one PATCH /layout call — up to 50 at a time — rather than one call per panel. A 429 answer means wait a minute and try again; the keyboard shortcut and the Reset layout button are not affected by that limit.

A request that names a protected region is refused with 403. Any other refusal is 422. Agent sessions hold a scoped token and can write the layout — that is the point — and every write is recorded against the session that made it and shown in the card. There is no approval prompt for a write; Undo, Reset and Safe Mode are the safety net.

The settings key for the off switch is panelLayoutEnabled. The launch option that restores the standard layout is --reset-layout: it acts as the app starts, and when the app is already running a second launch with the flag tells the running copy. The environment variable AMC_RESET_LAYOUT=1 does the same for a fresh start only.

Related

If you want to change colours, spacing or the look of a region rather than where it sits, Custom CSS is the open-ended tool, and it composes with this: your own CSS is applied after the layout, so it wins. Layout mods change what the sidebar and session list show; Panel layout changes where the panels sit.