Build a hunting layout

By the end you’ll have a combat screen — vitals, roundtime, targets, compass, hands — saved under a name you can load on any character, in either desktop frontend.

What you’ll build

VellumFE ships a deliberately plain screen. The default layout is six windows: main, command_input, thoughts, speech, room, and society. That is a reading screen. This guide turns it into a fighting screen.

You’ll finish with your story text still front and center, a vitals bar and a roundtime timer across the top where you can read them without leaving the text, and a right-hand column carrying targets, a compass, and your hands. Then you’ll save it as hunting, which makes it reproducible — on your next character, after a bad drag, or on the terminal.

📷 screenshot pending

The finished layout: story text filling the center, minivitals and RT in the Header zone, and Targets, Compass, Left Hand, and Right Hand stacked down the Right Bar.

Before you start

You’re connected and looking at a session. If not, see First Launch.
Two of these windows are GemStone IV only. minivitals and Reserve are gated to GS4 and won’t appear in the catalog on a DragonRealms character. Use the individual Health, Mana, Stamina, and Spirit bars there instead — they’re ungated, and step 2 tells you how.
Nothing here needs Lich, and nothing here edits a file by hand.

Steps

1. Turn on the zones you’re going to fill.

Click Zones in the top toolbar and switch on Header and Right Bar. The hub stays open, so you can toggle both and watch the canvas shrink around them. (Typed equivalent: .header on and .rightbar on.)

→ Expected result: a strip appears across the top of the window and a column down the right side. Both are empty, and your story window has resized to fit between them.

2. Add the windows.

Click Windows in the toolbar. The catalog opens and stays open — you’re going to add six windows without closing it once.

Two things to know before you start ticking. Rows are labeled by the window’s title, not its internal name, so you’re looking for RT, not “roundtime”, and Injuries, not “injury_doll”. And the categories start collapsed — expand a heading before you go hunting for a missing row.

Tick each of these, and set its zone on the same row using the control at the row’s right edge:

Tick this row	Set its zone to
minivitals	Header
RT	Header
Targets	Right Bar
Compass	Right Bar
Left Hand	Right Bar
Right Hand	Right Bar

On DragonRealms, there is no minivitals row. Tick Health, Mana, Stamina, and Spirit instead and send all four to Header — you’ll get four separate bars where GS4 gets one combined widget.

The zone control is a submenu rather than a drop-down list, so it opens a nested list beside the row. That’s deliberate: a true combo box counts as a click outside the toolbar menu and would close the whole catalog before you could pick anything.

📷 screenshot pending

The Windows catalog with categories expanded, minivitals and RT ticked, and a row's zone submenu open on Right Bar.

→ Expected result: six windows appear as you tick them — two in the header strip, four in the right column — and start showing live data immediately. The compass lights the exits of the room you’re standing in.

3. Arrange them.

Click outside the catalog to dismiss it. Now drag each window from anywhere on its body — no modifier, no need to find a title bar. Resize by dragging any edge or corner.

Edges snap: to the zone’s bounds, to the other windows in the same zone, and optionally to a grid, with a guide line drawn at each match. Put minivitals at the left of the header and RT at the right, then stack the right bar in the order you want to read it — Targets on top, Compass under it, the two hands at the bottom.

Hold Shift while you drop to suspend snapping entirely and place a window exactly under the pointer. That’s the escape hatch when a snap keeps pulling the compass flush against an edge you want it away from.

4. Pin the compass so it stops moving.

Right-click the compass ▸ Arrange ▸ Advanced ▸ tick Fixed size. Do the same for both hand windows.

Fixed size keeps a window’s exact width and height when the app window resizes or you zoom, so only its position adapts. A compass rose and a hands widget both look wrong stretched; the targets list wants to grow. Leave Targets unfixed.

5. Save it.

Type .savelayout hunting in the command input.

There is no button for this. Saving a layout is typed, in the GUI exactly as in the terminal — the catalog says so itself when you have no layouts yet.

→ Expected result: a confirmation in your story window. .layouts now lists hunting, and .loadlayout hunting rebuilds this screen from scratch at any point later.

The terminal has no shell zones — no header strip, no side bars. You place windows on the grid by coordinate instead, then adjust with the mouse. The result is the same screen; the route to it is arithmetic rather than menus.

1. Add the windows.

Type .addwindow with no arguments to open the widget picker, choose a widget, and it lands at a default spot you then drag. To place precisely, use the full form — .addwindow <name> <type> <x> <y> <w> [h], where x is the column and y the row.

On a 120x40 terminal, this fills the top strip and the right column:

.addwindow minivitals minivitals 0 0 40 3
.addwindow roundtime countdown 40 0 14 3
.addwindow targets targets 92 3 28 12
.addwindow compass compass 92 15 28 7
.addwindow left hand 92 22 28 3
.addwindow right hand 92 25 28 3

The <name> is a free label of your choosing — it identifies the window for .editwindow and .deletewindow later. The widget you get comes from <type>.

The argument count is 1 or 6-plus, with nothing valid in between. .addwindow compass on its own prints the usage line and adds nothing — the command either opens the picker (no arguments) or places a window (name, type, position, and size all supplied). Omit only the final height and it defaults to 10.

On DragonRealms, drop the minivitals line — that widget is GS4-only. Use four progress bars across the top instead:

.addwindow health progress 0 0 28 3
.addwindow mana progress 28 0 28 3
.addwindow stamina progress 56 0 28 3
.addwindow spirit progress 84 0 28 3

→ Expected result: each window draws where you put it and starts filling with live data. The compass lights the exits of your current room.

2. Move and resize them.

Drag the title bar — the top row, and only the top row. The TUI reserves a window’s body for text selection, so a drag that starts in the middle selects text rather than moving the window. (This differs from the GUI, which drags from anywhere.)

Resize from the right column, the bottom row, or the bottom-right corner cell. Two details save you a puzzled minute: the bottom row is only a handle when the window is taller than two rows, and the right column only when it’s wider than one. A three-row roundtime window resizes fine; a one-row bar has no bottom handle at all, by design — its bottom row is content.

3. Fine-tune anything the mouse can’t reach.

Right-click a title bar ▸ Edit Window… for the full-screen form, or type .editwindow <name>. Tab moves between fields, Ctrl+S saves, Esc cancels.

4. Save it.

Type .savelayout hunting.

→ Expected result: .layouts lists hunting. After you stretch the terminal or move to a different tmux pane, .resize refits the arrangement to the new dimensions instead of leaving windows clipped off the edge — and .loadlayout hunting brings the whole screen back.

Make it yours

If you fight in melee, trade the compass for the injury doll. A caster watches exits and mana; a melee character watches wounds. Untick Compass in the catalog and tick Injuries, sending it to Right Bar. The GUI draws it as a body diagram colored by wound and scar severity, and with a skin that ships doll art you can place the wound dots yourself through Calibrate doll… in the doll window’s right-click section. In the TUI, swap the .addwindow compass line for .addwindow injuries injury_doll 92 15 28 8.

You’ll see: a body diagram that colors a limb the moment you take a wound there, instead of you parsing the wound line out of scrolling text.

If you’re a spellcaster, add the effects trio to a Left Bar. Turn on the left zone (Zones ▸ Left Bar, or .leftbar on) and send Buffs, Debuffs, and Cooldowns there — three separate catalog rows, each an active-effects window carrying one category. Keeping them apart from the right column means your defensive spell timers never compete with your target list for the same glance.

You’ll see: three stacked lists counting down independently, so a lapsing 401 is visible before it drops rather than after.

If your terminal is small, put your side windows in a tabbed window instead of a column. Four windows down a 40-column right bar leaves nothing for text. Add one tabbedtext window and give it the streams you’d have split out, then switch tabs with a click. In the GUI, the tab list is Edit tabs… in the window’s own right-click section; in the TUI it’s the .editwindow form.

You’ll see: one window’s worth of screen doing four windows’ work, at the cost of only seeing one at a time.

When it doesn’t work

A window you ticked in the catalog doesn’t appear anywhere. Check its zone. If the zone is one you have switched off, the window is real and placed but the strip holding it isn’t drawn. Open Zones and turn that zone on, or move the window with right-click ▸ Arrange ▸ Move to ▸ Center.

You can’t find a row in the catalog. Two causes. The categories start collapsed — click a category heading to expand it before concluding the row is absent. And rows are sorted and labeled by title, so RT files under R, not under “roundtime” — search for what the window is called on screen, not what you’d type.

minivitals or Reserve is genuinely missing. Both are GemStone IV only and are filtered out of the catalog on a DragonRealms character. That’s gating working correctly, not a bug. Use the individual Health / Mana / Stamina / Spirit bars.

.addwindow compass prints a usage line and adds nothing. The command takes either no arguments (which opens the picker) or all six — name, type, x, y, width, and optionally height. A partial command falls through to the usage message. Type .addwindow alone and pick from the list instead.

A .addwindow window landed at the top-left corner in the wrong size. Numbers that fail to parse fall back silently rather than erroring — x and y to 0, width to 40, height to 10. Check for a stray character in the coordinates, delete it with .deletewindow <name>, and retype the line.

Dragging a TUI window’s middle selects text instead of moving it. That’s correct behavior: the TUI moves a window from its title bar only, unlike the GUI, which drags from anywhere. Grab the top row.

A TUI window won’t resize from its bottom edge. If it’s two rows tall or shorter, its bottom row is content, not a handle. Resize from the right column, or set the size in .editwindow.

A window snaps flush against an edge you want it away from. Hold Shift while dropping to suspend snapping for that gesture. If a window keeps drifting back to an edge on later resizes, it has a persistent anchor — right-click ▸ Arrange ▸ Release Anchors to forget it. The window stays exactly where it is and stops following. If snapping misbehaves in a way you can’t explain, .snapdebug writes a trace to ~/.vellum-fe/vellum-fe.log.

You resized the app window and everything is proportionally wrong. In the GUI, right-click the windows that shouldn’t stretch ▸ Arrange ▸ Advanced ▸ Fixed size — a compass and a hands widget want it, a text window doesn’t. In the TUI, run .resize to refit the layout to the terminal’s new dimensions.

You deleted a window and want it back. In the GUI, Windows ▸ ↩ Restore deleted… returns it with its position, streams, and widget type intact. That button only appears when something is waiting to be restored, so an empty stash means it’s genuinely not there. In the TUI, restore via .loadlayout hunting — which is the strongest argument for saving early and saving often.

⚠️ .deletewindow truly removes a window and .hidewindow only hides it — in both desktop frontends. There is no asymmetry between the GUI and the TUI to remember. Both refuse to remove your only main-feed window, so you cannot strand yourself without game text.

⚠️ In the Terminal (TUI), Ctrl+C copies your selection — it does not quit. In the Desktop GUI the same combination quits. Leave the TUI with .quit or .exit. This is the difference most likely to bite you while you’re moving between frontends mid-build.

VellumFE User Guide

Build a hunting layout

What you’ll build

Before you start

Steps

Make it yours

When it doesn’t work

See also

Keyboard shortcuts

VellumFE User Guide

Build a hunting layout

What you’ll build

Before you start

Steps

Make it yours

When it doesn’t work

See also