Appearance
Panels and layouts
The Mantis workspace is a grid of dockable tabs. Every feature that is not the map itself is a panel, you arrange them yourself, and the arrangement is saved in your browser. This page covers how the workbench behaves so that "my panel disappeared" and "my colleague's screen looks different" stop being mysteries.
Tabs, tabsets and dragging
Panels are flexlayout-react tabs. Drag a tab by its title to move it into another tabset, to split a tabset by dropping it against an edge, or to pull it out into its own window. Drag the splitters between tabsets to resize.
The tab strip carries a few affordances beyond the title:
- Park to rail (the panel icon) moves the panel to the Workspace Rail without unmounting it, so its state is preserved exactly.
- Close (the red X) discards the panel.
- Double-click a tab to enter resize mode; triple-click to expand it to the full row.
Map tabs have neither a park nor a close button.
The View menu
View is where every panel lives. It opens with the layout presets at the top, then a search box, then the panel catalogue grouped into sections that mirror the panel registry: Exploration, Inspection, Quantitative, Machine Learning, Agents, Finance, and Custom for panels loaded from a notebook.
Type in the search box to filter across every section. Selecting a panel that is already open adds a second instance rather than jumping to the first.
The Workspace Rail
The rail is the slim icon strip down the left edge. It holds parked panels, and expands on hover to show their names. Click one to put it back where it came from: the rail records the tabset and sibling weights it left, so a restore returns it to its old position rather than dumping it in the first available slot.
TIP
If a panel seems to have vanished, look in three places before reopening it: the rail, the overflow menu of a tabset that has more tabs than fit, and the map or page dropdown in the tab strip in case the panel is locked to a different map.
Layout presets
The top of the View menu lists nine built-in layouts:
| Preset | For |
|---|---|
| Default | Basic navigation and minimal agents |
| Rich | Greater navigation capabilities |
| Exploration | Space exploration and data inspection |
| Quantitative Analysis | Data analysis with plots and ML |
| Coding | Coding and quantitative analysis |
| Document Search & Gathering | Finding and organizing documents |
| Text Reading & Analysis | Document reading and analysis |
| Visual Brainstorming | AI-powered visual brainstorming workspace |
| Full | All panels, for large screens |
Default opens the Composer and Bags on the left, the Map in the center, and Tree, Inspector and File Browser on the right. Choosing a preset replaces your current arrangement; choosing the preset that is already active clears the workspace instead.
Save Layout as Preset stores your current arrangement on the server so it can be offered again. Presets saved this way appear under Platform Layouts or as space-scoped entries alongside the built-ins.
Layouts are per browser
Your arrangement is written to localStorage, keyed by your user and the space you are in. Nothing about it is shared.
The practical consequences:
- The same space opened in two browsers, or in a private window, legitimately shows two different arrangements. Neither is wrong.
- Clearing site data resets your layout to the space default or, failing that, to the built-in default.
- A layout never leaks between spaces or between users on a shared machine.
On load Mantis takes the space's default layout preset if one is set, then your stored layout for that space, then the built-in default.
Panels that open themselves
Some panels declare a point action: a rule saying "surface me when the selection looks like this". When your selection changes, Mantis waits 300 ms, counts the distinct points selected across all maps, and opens every enabled action whose conditions are met, in priority order, into the side tabset.
Each action states a minimum number of points, sometimes a maximum, and sometimes a required column type. Feature Analysis, for example, needs at least five points and a numeric column, so it never fires on a space with no numeric data.
Nine panels declare an action, listed here in the order they would open. Only two are enabled out of the box:
| Action | Panel | Fires on | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inspect Point | Inspector | exactly 1 point | on |
| Show Flashcard | Flashcards | exactly 1 point | off |
| Learn This | Learn Mode | exactly 1 point | off |
| Summarize Selection | Summarizer | 2+ points, text data | on |
| Feature Analysis | Meaningful Features | 5+ points, numeric data | off |
| Point Analysis | Point Analysis Controls | 1+ points | off |
| Retrieve Along Manifold | Memory Manifolds | 1+ points | off |
| Visualize Selection | Plots (Bokeh) | 2+ points, numeric or categorical | off |
| Plot Controls | Plot Controls (Simple) | 2+ points, numeric or categorical | off |
Turn them on and off under Settings > Selection Actions, described there as "Panels that auto-open when you select points". The preference is stored per browser and applies across spaces. Reset Defaults puts it back.
If panels keep appearing while you work, this is why, and this is where to stop it.
Panels follow a map
Each panel is pointed at one map. By default it follows the active view; the map dropdown and lock button in the tab strip pin it to a specific map instead. See Spaces and maps.
Read nextExplore panelsThe panels you will actually spend your time in, one page each.