Pain

A minimalist, fully tested pane-resizing plugin for Sublime Text 4.

Because there should be no pain when resizing panes.

Overview

Pain provides keyboard-driven pane resizing with two distinct resize modes: directional and growth. It is inspired by PanePane (no longer maintained) but rebuilt with a cleaner codebase, full type annotations, and support for both resize modes.

Resize Modes

Pain offers two ways of thinking about pane resizing. It maps four arrow keys to two dimensions (width and height); the meaning of each key depends on the active mode. You can switch between modes via the command palette or by changing the resize_mode setting.

Directional Mode (default)

“Push the separator in a fixed direction.”

This mode is intuitive when using arrow keys: the separator always moves in the arrow's direction.

The direction is consistent regardless of which pane is focused, whether inner or outer (see Examples below).

[!TIP] This is particularly beneficial in a two-column setup where there is only one separator: the left and right arrow keys always move it in the arrow's direction, regardless of which pane is focused:

When in the flow, you just want the separator to move without thinking about which pane you are in.

Enable it with:

"resize_mode": "directional"

Growth Mode

“Make this pane bigger or smaller.”

This mode is intuitive when you think: “I want this pane to be larger.”

Which separator moves depends on the pane's position in the layout. For inner panes, this mode is identical to directional mode. The two modes differ only at boundary panes (see Examples below).

Enable it with:

"resize_mode": "growth"

Equalize

Distributes all separators evenly, resetting every pane in the given dimension to equal size.

Examples

Two-column layout

When focused on an inner pane regarding width (with a neighbor to the right), both modes behave identically: the right arrow key moves the right separator rightward, and the left arrow key moves it leftward.

+------------+------------+
|            |            |
|            |            |
|            |            |
|            |            |
|     1      |     2      |
|            |            |
|            |            |
|            |            |
|            |            |
+------------+------------+

Regarding width, pane 1 is an inner pane (it has a movable separator on its right), while pane 2 is a boundary pane (its right edge is the window border). If pane 1 has focus, both modes behave identically: the middle separator is shifted left or right with Alt+Left/Right.

The two modes differ when focused on a boundary pane. Consider the rightmost pane 2, which only has a separator on its left side (the right separator/boundary cannot be altered). Suppose it has focus:

• In directional mode, the left arrow key moves that separator leftward (the pane grows) and the right arrow key moves it rightward (the pane shrinks). The arrow always matches the direction of movement.
• In growth mode, the right arrow key means “grow this pane” (the separator moves leftward) and the left arrow key means “shrink this pane” (the separator moves rightward). The arrow reflects the intent, not the physical direction; thus, the separator moves opposite to the key you pressed.

The same logic applies vertically, e.g., in a two-row layout: the two modes only differ for the bottommost pane.

The demos below show both panes being resized. Pane 1 (inner) responds identically in both modes; pane 2 (boundary) responds differently.

Directional Mode	Growth Mode

Complex layouts

The demos below use a 7-pane layout.

+----------+---------+---------+
|          |         |         |
|          |    2    |    3    |
|    1     |         |         |
|          +----+----+----+----+
|          |    |         |    |
|          |  4 |         |  6 |
|          |    |    5    |    |
|          +----+         |    |
|          |    |         |    |
|          |  7 |         |    |
|          |    |         |    |
+----------+----+---------+----+

Panes 1, 2, and 4 are inner panes and behave identically in both modes. Panes 3, 5, 6, and 7 are the boundary panes where directional and growth mode behave differently.

• Pane 3 is a boundary pane for width only. Both modes resize the same way vertically with Alt+Up/Down.
• Pane 6 is a boundary pane for both width and height. Both modes operate differently here.
• Panes 5 and 7 are boundary for height only. Regarding width they are inner panes, so both modes resize the same way horizontally.

The following gives a comparison of only the movements that differ between the two modes at boundary panes 3, 5, 6, and 7.

Directional Mode	Growth Mode
Resizing boundary panes 3, 5, 6, and 7	Resizing boundary panes 3, 5, 6, and 7

Installation

Package Control

Open the command palette (Ctrl+Shift+P), select Package Control: Install Package, and search for Pain.

Manual

Clone or symlink the Pain/ directory into your Sublime Text Packages/ folder:

# Linux
~/.config/sublime-text/Packages/Pain/

# macOS
~/Library/Application Support/Sublime Text/Packages/Pain/

# Windows
%APPDATA%\Sublime Text\Packages\Pain\

Key Bindings

Pain does not ship default key bindings to avoid conflicts with other packages. Add the bindings you prefer to your user keymap (Preferences > Key Bindings).

Suggested Bindings (Linux / Windows)

[
    // Directional: move separator left / Growth: decrease width
    { "keys": ["alt+left"],   "command": "pain_resize", "args": { "dimension": "width",  "resize": "decrease" } },
    // Directional: move separator right / Growth: increase width
    { "keys": ["alt+right"],  "command": "pain_resize", "args": { "dimension": "width",  "resize": "increase" } },
    // Directional: move separator up / Growth: decrease height
    { "keys": ["alt+up"],     "command": "pain_resize", "args": { "dimension": "height", "resize": "decrease" } },
    // Directional: move separator down / Growth: increase height
    { "keys": ["alt+down"],   "command": "pain_resize", "args": { "dimension": "height", "resize": "increase" } },
    // Equalize all panes
    { "keys": ["alt+="],      "command": "pain_resize", "args": { "dimension": "all",    "resize": "equal" } }
]

Suggested Bindings (macOS)

[
    // Directional: move separator left / Growth: decrease width
    { "keys": ["super+ctrl+left"],  "command": "pain_resize", "args": { "dimension": "width",  "resize": "decrease" } },
    // Directional: move separator right / Growth: increase width
    { "keys": ["super+ctrl+right"], "command": "pain_resize", "args": { "dimension": "width",  "resize": "increase" } },
    // Directional: move separator up / Growth: decrease height
    { "keys": ["super+ctrl+up"],    "command": "pain_resize", "args": { "dimension": "height", "resize": "decrease" } },
    // Directional: move separator down / Growth: increase height
    { "keys": ["super+ctrl+down"],  "command": "pain_resize", "args": { "dimension": "height", "resize": "increase" } },
    // Equalize all panes
    { "keys": ["super+ctrl+="],     "command": "pain_resize", "args": { "dimension": "all",    "resize": "equal" } }
]

Commands

Resize commands are designed for repeated, rapid keypresses and are only available through key bindings (see above). The following commands are available from the command palette (Ctrl+Shift+P):

Settings

Open settings via Preferences > Package Settings > Pain > Settings.

Package Landscape

Pain is a dedicated pane-resizing plugin. The Sublime Text ecosystem has several pane-related packages.

Origami

Origami (146K installs) is the standard pane management plugin, maintained under the official Sublime Text organization. It handles the full pane lifecycle: creating / destroying / navigating / carrying / cloning files between panes.

Origami and Pain are complementary:

• Origami excels at pane creation and navigation (Ctrl+K then arrow keys to create/destroy/travel between panes).
• Pain excels at pane resizing with simple, repeatable hotkeys.

Origami does include resize-related features (zoom and separator editing), but they serve a different use case:

• Zoom sets the active pane to a fixed fraction (e.g. 90%) in a single action. This is useful for temporarily maximizing focus, not for fine-grained incremental adjustment.
• Separator editing opens an input panel where you type exact separator positions as decimal values (e.g. 0.3, 0.7). This is precise but not suitable for rapid keyboard-driven resizing.

Pain also offers two resize modes (directional and growth) that have no equivalent in Origami. See Resize Modes.

Retired packages

To the best of my knowledge, the following packages that provide pane resizing functionality are unfortunately no longer maintained and/or outdated, or have a different purpose:

Mode legend:

• directional: moves a specific border in a direction
• growth: grows or shrinks the active pane
• –: other approach (zoom, ratio snap, auto-resize on focus, etc.)

Pain is the only ST4-native plugin that offers both directional and growth modes.

Issues

Found a bug or have a feature request? Please open an issue on GitHub:

https://github.com/ilyaZar/Pain/issues