Layout Setup, Save & Quick Search

To break out of the single-chart view, click the 'Select Layout' icon — the small square grid on the top toolbar. It opens a menu of grid shapes: one chart, two side by side, two stacked, a 2x2 grid, and larger arrangements. Picking one instantly partitions your browser tab into that many charts.

Each panel in the grid is a complete chart in its own right. It has its own symbol, its own timeframe, its own indicators and its own drawings. Clicking a panel makes it the 'active' chart — the one the top toolbar and your keyboard shortcuts act on. The active panel is outlined, which matters when you are firing shortcuts quickly.

How far you can split the screen depends on your subscription tier. Free accounts stay on a single chart. Paid tiers scale up, and the highest tiers are built for desks that track an entire sector at once rather than one instrument at a time.

A concrete Indian setup to start with is the two-chart layout. Put the NIFTY 50 index on the left panel and BANKNIFTY on the right, both on the 15-minute timeframe, with the crosshair and time axis synced. When NIFTY prints a breakout candle, your eye moves right and you see in the same instant whether BANKNIFTY confirmed it or ignored it.

That pairing is useful because BANKNIFTY is the heavier, faster-moving index and banking stocks carry real weight inside NIFTY, so the two normally move together. When they stop moving together — NIFTY holding up while BANKNIFTY breaks its intraday low — that divergence is information you cannot see while flipping between two tabs from memory.

The second setup is a four-chart F&O expiry-day workspace. F&O means Futures and Options: derivative contracts that expire on fixed dates, when price often moves in bursts. Panel 1 holds the NIFTY daily chart for structure. Panel 2 the NIFTY 15-minute for the intraday trend. Panel 3 the NIFTY 5-minute for timing. Panel 4 holds BANKNIFTY on 5-minute as a cross-check.

Sync the symbol across panels 1 to 3 and leave panel 4 independent. Change the symbol on any of the first three and all three follow, so the same three-timeframe stack can be re-pointed at NSE:RELIANCE or NSE:INFY in one keystroke, while BANKNIFTY sits untouched as a market barometer.

One caution before you jump to a sixteen-chart grid: every extra panel is a smaller panel. On a 14-inch laptop, four charts is usually the practical ceiling before candle wicks get too thin to read accurately, and a misread wick is a mis-drawn level. Larger grids assume a big external monitor or the desktop app spread across two screens.

Four charts on screen are useless if you retype the ticker on all four every time you switch stock. Linking — TradingView calls it 'Sync in Layout' — solves that. It lets you nominate which properties travel between panels, so a change on one chart is pushed to the others automatically.

The toggles sit at the bottom of the same 'Select Layout' dropdown. Each toggle is independent, and that independence is the whole point: you almost never want everything synced at once. Syncing the symbol but not the interval is exactly what makes multi-timeframe analysis work, because the panels must show one stock on several different clocks.

Symbol sync is the toggle most people turn on first. Type NSE:TCS into any panel and every linked panel reloads TCS while keeping its own timeframe. Your Daily, 15-minute and 5-minute stack re-points at a new stock in a single action instead of three separate ones.

Crosshair sync links the mouse position across panels. Hover over the 11:30 IST candle on your 5-minute NIFTY chart and a crosshair appears at that same moment in time on the Daily chart beside it. It answers 'where does this intraday move sit inside the bigger structure' without counting candles by hand.

Time sync — shown in some builds as date-range sync — scrolls the panels together along the horizontal axis. Drag one chart back to a particular week and the others move to the same window. That is what you want when studying how NSE:HDFCBANK and BANKNIFTY behaved across the same run of sessions.

Drawing sync copies annotations between panels showing the same symbol. Mark a support zone on the NIFTY weekly chart and the same zone renders, correctly scaled, on your 15-minute execution chart. It keeps intraday decisions anchored to levels you drew with a longer-term view, rather than to lines invented mid-session.

Interval sync pushes the timeframe itself across panels, so all charts jump from 5-minute to Daily together. Most multi-timeframe workflows leave this one OFF — the entire reason for a four-panel stack is that each panel holds a different clock. Turn it on only when you are comparing several symbols on one identical timeframe.

For partial linking, use the chart-group marker on each panel's status line. Click the marker on chart 1 and chart 2 and assign both the same colour or emoji, then leave charts 3 and 4 unmarked or on a different colour. Only panels sharing a marker sync with each other.

Applied to the expiry workspace: mark the three NIFTY panels with one colour so they share a symbol, and leave the BANKNIFTY panel unmarked. Typing NSE:INFY into any marked panel moves all three onto Infosys, while BANKNIFTY keeps ticking as your reference for whether the wider market is moving with you or against you.

A layout is not only the grid shape. When you save it, TradingView stores the symbol in every panel, each panel's timeframe, every indicator, every drawing, your sync toggles, your colour scheme and your scale settings. It is the whole state of the workspace, not a screenshot of it.

Saving lives in the layout-name dropdown at the top right. 'Save' overwrites the layout you are currently in. 'Save As' creates a new named copy and leaves the original untouched. Build the habit of Save As before you experiment, because Save is silent and there is no undo for a workspace you have overwritten.

Because the save goes to TradingView's servers rather than your browser's local storage, the layout is tied to your account and not to your machine. Build the four-panel expiry workspace on a Windows desktop and it opens in the same state on a MacBook, and in a reduced form on the mobile app, once you log in.

Free accounts are limited to 1 saved layout, so in practice every change overwrites the one you have. Paid tiers raise that count sharply, which is what makes a library of purpose-built workspaces realistic instead of one compromise chart that half-serves every job.

Name layouts by job, not by symbol. 'NIFTY-INTRADAY-15M', 'SWING-DAILY-CASH' and 'EXPIRY-DAY-4PANEL' each tell you what the workspace is for. Calling them 'Chart 1' and 'Chart 2' guarantees you will open three of them looking for the right one while the 09:15 IST open runs away from you.

This explains the most common complaint new users have — drawings that 'disappeared'. They were not deleted. Drawings are saved into the layout you drew them in, so loading a different layout loads a different set of annotations. Save the current layout before switching and the work will be waiting when you return.

Separate layouts also do useful psychological work. Keeping a clean price-action workspace for weekly study apart from a busier execution workspace for intraday means you are less likely to take an impulsive five-minute trade off a chart you had opened to do longer-term analysis.

The Global Command Search is a command palette: one search box that indexes the platform's settings, tools, indicators and actions. Press `Ctrl + K` on Windows or `Cmd + K` on Mac, type what you want, press Enter. It is the same idea code editors use, applied to a charting platform.

It matters because TradingView's controls are spread across a top toolbar, a left toolbar, a bottom panel, a right sidebar, a right-click menu and a multi-tab settings dialog. Remembering which of those holds 'session breaks' costs seconds every time. Typing the word 'session' costs none.

Practical examples during a live NSE session: `Ctrl + K` then 'log' switches the price scale to logarithmic. `Ctrl + K` then 'fib' arms the Fibonacci retracement tool. `Ctrl + K` then 'replay' opens Bar Replay. `Ctrl + K` then 'dark' flips the theme. None of these require you to know where the control physically lives.

Do not confuse it with symbol search. On a chart, simply starting to type letters opens the symbol box — that is how you move from NIFTY to NSE:RELIANCE. `Ctrl + K` deliberately opens a different box, and that box will not load a ticker. Two search fields, two separate jobs.

The palette is keyboard-only by design: arrow keys move the highlight, Enter runs the highlighted result, Escape closes it. Commit to it and an entire chart-setup routine — symbol, timeframe, scale, session breaks, a drawing tool — runs without your hand leaving the keyboard.

It has limits worth knowing before you rely on it. It finds platform features and indicator names; it does not surface your own saved drawings, your alerts or your watchlist entries, and it will never place an order. Treat it as a fast route to a setting, not as a general-purpose assistant.