A workspace is a saved arrangement of panels, and it is the feature that turns a terminal into your terminal.
The reason to bother: different kinds of trading need genuinely different things on screen. Trading in and out over minutes wants an order book, a depth chart and a ticket, all large. Holding for weeks wants a daily chart, news and research, and does not need a book at all. Rather than rebuilding your screen every time you change mode, you keep both and switch between them.
Most people end up with three or four: one per market they trade, plus a research one.
Building one
New Workspace in the left nav creates an empty grid. Add panels from the empty-cell placeholder, from omni-search (⌘K, then Add to layout), or from the pane menu on an existing panel.
Split a cell horizontally or vertically, replace what is in it, or close it. Panels marked as singletons appear once per workspace, which is why you cannot end up with two Portfolio panels quietly disagreeing.
Rename a workspace, change its icon, or delete it from its context menu.
Or ask for one
The assistant builds workspaces. It reads the panel catalogue first, so it works from the panes you actually have rather than a list it remembers, and plugin panes are in that catalogue the moment you install them.
Build me a perps desk: chart on the left, funding and open interest stacked on the right, liquidation map underneath. Put it in a Perps folder.
It creates the folder, builds the board, wires the panes that follow a pair to
the workspace’s $pair variable, seeds that variable with whatever you had on
screen, and opens it. Then you can keep going in the same breath: “add a tape
under the book”, “call it Funding desk instead”, “copy the Scalper’s Cockpit
into that folder too”.
It also works the other way round. Rearrange a board by hand and say save this as a workspace, and what is on screen becomes a saved one, variables derived and panes bound. On a board you are already on, rebuild this asks before it lands: replacing every pane shows you the new geometry on a card first. Deleting a workspace asks too.
Full tool list in the assistant tool reference.
Moving a panel
The thin line between two stacked panels is the resize handle: drag it to give one panel more room. Drag the gap between two columns to change the split.
Every panel carries a grip at the right end of its title row. It is always there, faint, and comes up to full strength the moment your pointer enters the panel, so the handle is lit before you reach for it and nothing shifts on the way in. Drag the grip, or the panel’s title, to pick the panel up. Drop it on the middle of another panel to stack the two as tabs, on an edge to split, or past the outer edge of a column to start a new one. The grip takes focus from the keyboard too.
A close button sits beside the grip and appears with it. Close Pane in the panel’s right-click menu does the same, alongside Pop Out to Column and the variable bindings below.
A few panels size to what they draw rather than to a share of the column: the trade ticket, the risk bar, and the equities session strips. They take the height they need and hand the rest to whatever is stacked with them, which is why the session strip on the stock boards is one row tall on a 4K screen and one row tall on a laptop. When a column is too short to hold one of them outright, the panel scrolls instead of squeezing its neighbours to nothing: every other panel in that column keeps at least the height it declares.
Discovery is one board per asset class
Discovery carries tabs beside its title, one per asset class: CEX Spot, Equities, CEX Futures, DEX, Memecoins, Predictions, NFT. Each tab is a full workspace of its own. Rearrange the futures board and the spot board has not moved, and each one remembers its own arrangement between sessions.
Every class has one fixed colour, and it is the same colour the badge beside the pair symbol wears on the trade page (see terminal tour). Amber is spot, green is equities, violet is perps, magenta is on-chain, lime is memecoins, cyan is event contracts, coral is NFTs. Pick a tab here and the pair you open from it is badged in the colour you clicked.
Every tab opens on a board built for what that class is actually shopped on, and not one of them opens on an A-to-Z list of pairs.
CEX Spot opens on what moved and why: a market pulse strip over the movers table over the sector tape, the news wire beside them, and your watchlist in the right rail. Clicking a sector in the tape narrows the movers table above it to that sector rather than navigating away, and a chip on the table says which sector it is holding; click the chip to let all of them back in. Every pane on this board works with no account connected. The full markets scanner is not on it, since the list you want by name is a keystroke away in omni-search: add the panel from Panes, or open the Markets board from the workspaces menu, and it follows the same sector selection.
Equities is built around the calendar rather than the tape. The session state leads, the earnings calendar sits under it and macro releases under those, with the movers and the news wire beside them. No sentiment gauge and no heatmap here: both read a crypto index and would be quietly wrong above a list of tickers.
CEX Futures scans by cost of carry instead of by price. The funding matrix takes the wide column with the basis monitor under it, and open interest sits beside them over the funding extremes. A price scanner already exists on the spot board, and repeating it here would have made the section the same page a fifth time.
DEX is chain first, then pool: a chain rail on the left, pools ranked by volume against the liquidity backing them in the middle over the flow chart, and the selected pool’s detail on the right.
Memecoins is four columns, one per stage of a token’s life: New Mints minted in the last few hours, Graduating climbing a bonding curve with progress against the threshold that migrates them, Graduated already trading on an AMM pool, and Legendary the large caps that outlived their cycle. Equal widths, because which stage deserves your attention is your call. Full details in memecoins.
Predictions swaps the pair scanner for the event board, since outcomes are listed and resolved daily and never sit in a catalog of pairs. A category rail narrows the board, and a right rail carries the biggest odds moves over what settles soonest.
NFT is chain first, then collection. A chain rail on the left is the argument every other pane takes rather than a filter over one result set, since NFT data is chain-scoped at the provider: picking Base re-asks for rankings, movers, mints and the tape. The market strip sits over the rankings table, and the right rail carries floor movers, fresh mints and the whale tape above a size threshold you set. See NFT collections.
The markets scanner is on whatever board you add it to. It opens on that tab’s asset class and remembers its own filter per tab, so widening one board to every market is a decision about that board alone.
Drag a tab to reorder it, or right-click one and move it left or right. If you trade event contracts and nothing else, put Predictions first. The Workspaces menu and Browse Workspace Store follow the open tab, so the suggestions match the markets in front of you. A tab appears only while the plugin that owns its board is installed, which makes uninstalling Pairlens Predictions the way to remove predictions from Discovery entirely.
One pair layout per asset class
The pair page itself is a workspace too, and it is saved per asset class. Spot, perpetuals, DEX tokens, stocks, prediction markets, and NFT collections each keep their own arrangement: rearrange the panels while charting a perp and your spot layout has not moved.
Each class ships a default built for what it trades.
Spot Execution is the chart with the tape, positions and market data tabbed below it, and a rail that leads with the cross-venue ladder above the order book and the ticket. The ladder goes first because the question right before clicking is which venue fills this cheapest.
Perps Terminal keeps that skeleton and swaps the spot positions pane for Futures Positions with entry, mark and liquidation, beside a leverage-aware ticket.
DEX Terminal drops the order book entirely, because pool-quoted depth is synthetic. In its place: the chart over Pool Stats, the on-chain tape beside it, and the swap ticket above the aggregator Route, so the slippage on the ticket has a cause you can read.
Memecoin Terminal is not the DEX board with a different name. A pool desk reads reserves, fee tier and price impact; a memecoin desk reads market cap, who is buying, and whether the deployer can still mint. So the chart sits over Buy / Sell Flow, with Token Stats and Token Safety in the middle column and the swap ticket on the right. Memecoin Sniper keeps the New and Graduating columns on screen beside the chart, for working launches without leaving the board.
Equities Terminal leads with the session clock, because extended hours change what the ticket will accept rather than just a label on it. Level 1 quotes sit over the ticket and the symbol wire.
Prediction Terminal leads with the event header, since a prediction pair is a question and the question belongs above the chart. The data strip opens on the Outcome Ladder, so every answer to that question is priced and one click from the ticket before you have scrolled anywhere; What Moved It, the tape and your open contracts sit behind it as tabs. The right column carries the event brief over the event browser.
NFT Desk puts the collection header over the chart and the two-sided ladder directly under it, because on an NFT market the ladder is the liquidity story: a floor with two items behind it and a floor with two hundred are the same number and completely different markets. Listings and offers take the right column, the ticket sits under the ladder, and the items grid is demoted to a tab beside the tape and the trait breakdown.
Beyond the default, each class carries its own named boards in the same menu:
| Class | Boards beside Default |
|---|---|
| CEX Spot | Research for a position held longer than a session: chart over the pair dossier, the pair’s own wire beside it, sector peers under the ticket, and no depth stream open |
| CEX Futures | Carry, with the funding belt above the chart; Risk, with the liquidation map, margin health and your guardrails editable in place |
| DEX | Liquidity for the LP side of the pool, with the manage panel beside it; Cross-Chain for the same token priced per chain, with the bridge quote and in-flight transfers beside it |
| Equities | Company, the ticker read as a business rather than a price, with its insider filings under it |
| Predictions | Race, for a field of a hundred rather than a handful: the outcome ladder gets the whole strip and the basket ticket sits beside it |
| NFT | Collector, for picking a token rather than the floor: the items grid at full width with the trait breakdown in its own column, and the ticket still there |
The Workspaces menu follows the same rule as the defaults: on a prediction market it suggests layouts built for prediction markets, not a spot execution desk, and Browse Workspace Store opens the store already filtered to that asset class.
Layouts ship with the plugin that owns them
Those per-class layouts are not baked into the app. Each asset-class plugin carries its own: the perps desk and the futures Discovery board come from Pairlens Futures, the prediction desk and the event-market board from Pairlens Predictions, the on-chain boards from Pairlens DEX, the stock boards from Pairlens Equities, the collection boards from Pairlens NFTs. Disable or uninstall one from the Plugins page and its layouts leave the Workspace Store, the Workspaces menu, and Discovery (its tab included) immediately. Enable it again and they come back.
Spot is the exception, and deliberately: its boards ship in Pairlens Core, which cannot be uninstalled, so the Spot tab is always there and the terminal always has a home to open on.
A layout you already saved keeps working either way. Only the ready-made entries come and go with the plugin.
Third-party plugins ship workspaces the same way, through a workspaces block
in the manifest. See the Plugin SDK for the
declaration.
Folders
Workspaces nest in folders, and folders nest in folders. Once you have a dozen layouts, grouping them by asset class or by strategy is the difference between a sidebar you scan and a sidebar you search.
Deleting a folder moves its workspaces to the root rather than deleting them.
Variables
This is the feature that makes a workspace reusable rather than a snapshot.
A variable is a named binding that panels attach to instead of hard-coding a pair. Four types:
| Type | Binds |
|---|---|
| Pair | An instrument, with its market |
| Timeframe | A candle interval |
| String | Any text value |
| Wallet | One of your connected accounts |
Declare $main as a pair variable, point three panels at it, and switching
$main switches all three at once. Declare $compare as a second pair
variable and you have a side-by-side comparison layout that works for any two
instruments you point it at.
The variables editor shows how many panels use each variable, so you know what you are about to affect before you change one.
A panel can also hold an instrument of its own without a variable behind it. That is what the chart’s symbol chip writes, and what the ready-made Dual, Triple and Quad chart boards arrive with: one panel per instrument, changeable panel by panel. Its pane menu clears the pin and hands the panel back to the page’s pair.
Panels declare what they need. A chart needs an active pair; a trade ticket needs a pair and a wallet. A panel whose requirement is unbound tells you what to pick rather than rendering empty.
Multiple windows
On desktop, Open in new window pulls a workspace into its own OS window. Two monitors, two workspaces, one running app. State stays in sync across windows, and one window is elected leader so notifications fire once.
The Workspace Store
Rather than building from scratch, copy one. Workspace Store in the left nav browses ready-made layouts, filtered by trader type, asset, and screen size.
Each template shows what it needs before you take it:
Ready to use. Every plugin it uses is already installed.
Some plugins disabled. You have them, but turned off. Enable them from the Plugins page.
Needs extra plugins. Some panels rely on plugins you do not have. You can still add the workspace; those panels stay empty until you install them.
Templates also declare their security posture. Most panels come from bundled plugins that already run with full access. If a template pulls in a plugin requiring full access, you are asked to approve it explicitly before it is activated, and told which plugin and why.
Templates come from three sources: Pairlens (bundled with the app or shipped by one of its plugins), Community (shared by other traders), and Yours.
Sharing your own
Built something good? Share to store publishes a workspace as a template others can browse and copy. Give it a name, a one-line hook, a description, tags, and an icon. Sharing needs a signed-in account, and you can remove a template from the store later.
Sharing publishes the layout, not your data. No credentials, no positions, no chart history.
What syncs
Workspaces, their layouts, and their variables persist locally by default and sync across devices when you are signed in. Signing in changes where the layout is stored. It never changes where your credentials are stored.
Related
- Panels for the full catalogue
- Terminal tour
- Plugins for adding new panels