First run

Spawn, focus, move, pan, zoom — the handful of keys that make the plane click in the first five minutes.

You're in. The screen is empty — that's the plane, an unbounded canvas, and your monitor is a viewport onto it. Here's the muscle memory, in the order you'll build it. (Mod is Alt nested, Super on a real session; this page writes Mod.)

If the vocabulary below — plane, column, cell — isn't familiar yet, read the mental model first. It's short, and it makes every key obvious.

1. Spawn a window

Mod+Return            new terminal in a new column
Mod+Shift+Return      new terminal stacked below in the same column

Press Mod+Return a few times — terminals tile into columns, left to right. Mod+Shift+Return stacks the next one below the focused window in the same column instead. That's the whole tiling primitive: columns across, cells down.

2. Move focus

Mod+h / Mod+j / Mod+k / Mod+l     focus left / down / up / right

Vim directions. Focus is a single window; the focused one wears a bright border. Moving focus to a window that's off the edge of your monitor pans the viewport to bring it into view — you never lose the focused window behind the screen edge.

3. Move the window

Mod+Shift+h/j/k/l     move the focused window left / down / up / right

Same keys, plus Shift, move the window rather than the focus. Push a window past the top or bottom edge of the sheet and it starts a new row — that's the second dimension. Rows stack vertically, columns run horizontally within a row.

4. Pan the viewport

Mod+Ctrl+h/j/k/l      pan the viewport left / down / up / right

Focus follows you automatically, but you can also drive the viewport directly. Pan in any of the four directions to look at a different part of the plane without moving any window. (There's also a pan submap on Mod+w so you can pan with bare h/j/k/l — press Escape to leave it.)

5. Zoom out to see everything

Mod+z                 zoom out one step along the ladder
Mod+Shift+z           zoom back in
Mod+scroll            ride the same ladder with the mouse wheel

The viewport doesn't just pan — it zooms, along a fixed ladder: 100% → 50% → fit-plane → (overview). The fit-plane rung shows every window on the plane at once, centered — it's the per-plane overview, and it's a plain zoom level, so you keep working while zoomed: click to focus, spawn, resize, drag. Every step keeps the visible center fixed, so what you were looking at stays put.

One step past fit-plane opens the global overview — every plane in the pool as a live mini-canvas. More on that in Concepts.

6. The rest of the essentials

Mod+t                 tab / untab the focused column
Mod+Tab               cycle tabs
Mod+space             float / re-tile the focused window
Mod+f                 fullscreen toggle
Mod+s / Mod+Shift+s   cycle column-width presets
Mod+q                 close the focused window
Mod+Shift+e           quit atlaswm

Drag a floating window with Mod+left-drag; resize a tiled seam (or a float's corner) with Mod+right-drag.

Where to go next

• Keybindings — the full default table, how to rebind, and the resize / planes submaps.
• Configuration — the live-reloaded KDL config: where it lives and what each block does.
• Concepts — planes, tags, scratchpads, anchors, marks, groups: the deeper model you compose into a workflow.
• Workflow recipes — copy-paste configs that shape atlaswm into a niri-, driftwm-, i3/sway-like or spatial setup.