The tile command spreads models out into a plane (XY grid arrangement), keeping their current orientations, and assigns the left mouse button to independent rotation. For Mac users with Trackpad gestures enabled in the Trackpad preferences, it also sets trackpad two-finger drag to independent rotation. If independent rotation with left mouse gets turned off (e.g., when tiled models are restored from a session), it can be reactivated with the command:
mousemode left "rotate independent"
The tile command also switches to simple lighting because the simultaneous independent rotation of multiple models may be too slow when multishadowing is used.
The command tile off or ~tile puts the models back together and restores the left mouse button and Mac trackpad two-finger drag to standard (collective) rotation. Tiling can also be reverted with undo. See also: view, matchmaker, align, volume tile, scripting independent rotation
Models that are not displayed will be ignored. The columns keyword specifies arranging the models into N columns in the viewing plane. If not specified, a square layout (rows = columns) will be used.
The spacingFactor f indicates how far apart the structures should be spaced, with larger values giving greater separations (default 1.3). The factor is multiplied by the center-to-corner distance of the largest per-model bounding box to give the spacing.
The viewAll option (default true) adjusts the view to enclose all displayed models regardless of whether they were specified, like using the view command without arguments.