How to achieve a split-screen-like operation on iPad OS26?

Hi. I'll try to help, but keep in mind I was never on the beta, I've only been playing with this a little bit over the last couple of days, and I've been completely unable to find any documentation for VO on this. I'm sort of hoping someone who's been doing this longer can give some advice to make this easier, but here we go.

First, make sure you go into the multitasking section in setings and turn windowing mode on, otherwise none of this will work. You might also at least temporarily want to turn on the mode where all windows disappear when you go home, since with this new system it's quite possible to do the thing you can do on the Mac and end up with a tonne of windows stacked on top of each other, ☺️

I'll use Mail and Safari as examples here, but this can be any two apps. If you've got an external keyboard, first, open mail. Then, open Safari using the dock or spotlight or something. Them, hit I think, globe-shift-control-right or left arrow. At that point, the last two apps you opened are on half the screen each.

If you've can't remember the keystrokes, or if you want to arrange windows in a bunch of other ways, hit globe-m and go to the windows section of the menu bar. Under move and resize there's a bunch of stuff.

If you're *not* using a keyboard, it's a little bit more fiddly. Basically, every app starts in full screen mode. Open mail. Go to the very bottom right corner of the screen and you'll find something that says "resize mail". Double tap and hold on it and drag it a tiny bit. It doesn't really matter where, just drag up a tiny bit or something. After that two things will appear, a button at the top centre of the window that says "move mail" and a button on the far left that's the multi-tasking menu.

Now open Safari , probably from your dock if you've set windows to vanish when you go home, ☺️Tap on multi-tasking, then triple tap or double-tap and hold on the zoom option. At that point you'll see all those other windowing options you got to from the menu bar using the keyboard instructions.

You can also bring up that menu bar I think without the keyboard by pulling the top of the window down a bit, but I'm still working on figuring that out.

If things get too confusing, find that multi-tasking button and hit zoom, and the window will go full screen.

I also think you can add windowing as a control in the control panel so you can turn it on and off when you don't want to bother with it.

It sounds more complicated than it is, particularly with a keyboard, but as I said I'm just working all this out myself.

Do you think you can explain how to use stage manager on the iPad on iPad OS 26 too? I think that sounds like a wonderful feature as well. I have bee playing around with it but haven’t yet figured out how it works.

I am using a bluetooth keyboard case on my iPad.

Honestly, I haven't even gone there yet, If nobody does it first I certainly will once I play with it.

What I do know is that it's a layer on top of the windowing system I just tried to explain, so I'm waiting to get a bit more comfortable with that first, ☺️.i

Honestly, I'd settle for a gesture that brought up the menu bar, the way the keyboard command does, I don't think such a thing exists yet, but it certainly could if Apple added it to the system commands - I've given myself a Spotlight gesture I can use from anywhere that way.

Honestly though, I'm the weirdo that actually likes using an ipad without a keyboard. No, you can't treat it like a phone and swipe everywhere, but once you know where things are on the screen it can be really fast and efficient, to the point I really hate navigating with a keyboard. Oh well, we're all different.

I'll keep playing with the windows. The one thing I didn't mention was that, the size of a window is sticky, even once you go away from it, so that mail window you set to half the screen stays that way until you zoom it or otherwise move/resize it or close it. Or, I guess open a new window for the app at which point you'd have one fullscreen window and one halfsized one.

As I said, it's complicated, since it's a real mac-like windowing system.

Using an iPad without keyboard is also great. The thing is that I have it on because I write a lot and need it because while it’s technically possible to write a book using braille screen input (I have done that) I think that would be a bit slow.