The AmiBroker Interface and Its Vocabulary

AmiBroker’s interface is not complicated, but its vocabulary is precise, and the words are easy to mix up because in ordinary English they overlap. A pane is not a sheet. A sheet is not a template. A template is not a layout. Each of those is a specific container holding specific things, and later parts of this course give instructions in exactly those terms.

Getting the words right is not pedantry. If you save a template when you meant a layout, you lose the second monitor. If you look for your saved layout in the wrong database, it will not be there — and the reason is a documented distinction between local and global layouts that has nothing to do with anything going wrong.

The main window, from the outside in

What contains what

each level holds the ones below

1. LayoutEvery open window: sizes, positions, symbols, intervals, which sheet is showingper database, or global
2. WindowOne chart document. Carries an MDI tab at the top, auto-named
3. TemplateThe complete set of chart sheets in one window
4. Chart sheetOne set of chart panes, reached by a renameable tab at the bottom
5. Chart paneOne formula drawing one or more plots
6. PlotOne line, one histogram, one candle series

Read upwards to answer 'what do I need to save to keep this?'

A fresh installation shows you four things at once: a toolbar strip along the top, the workspace pane on the left with a symbol list in it, one or more chart windows filling the rest, and — if you look carefully — two separate rows of tabs.

Those two rows of tabs are the first thing to get straight, because conflating them causes more confusion than anything else in the interface.

MDI tabs run along the top. One per open document. Their names are generated automatically: Symbol - FullName for a chart window, the page title for a web window, the account file name for the Account Manager. You cannot rename an MDI tab. You can turn the whole row off, in Tools -> Customize on the Appearance page, with the Show MDI tabs checkbox.

Chart sheet tabs run along the bottom, below the scroll bar. These you can rename — right-click a tab and a rename dialog appears. You can drag them to reorder, scroll them with the arrow buttons at the end of the strip, and right-click over the arrows to pop up a menu listing every tab for direct selection without scrolling.

✕Common mistake

“I renamed my tab and the name did not stick” almost always means the wrong row of tabs. The top row is auto-named from the document and is not editable; the bottom row is yours. When a lesson says “switch to the Trend sheet”, it means the bottom row.

The workspace panes

The left-hand area is conventionally called the Workspace window, and it has four tabs, each also openable as a standalone dockable window from the Window menu:

• Symbols (Window -> Symbols) — the symbol tree, with the whole category system in it, plus a search box and a symbol list. The symbol you select here is global to the program: every symbol-aware function and window follows it. This pane gets a lesson of its own two pages from here.
• Layouts (Window -> Layouts) — the list of saved window layouts, split into local and global.
• Layers (Window -> Layers) — the list of chart layers, which control the visibility of hand-drawn objects.
• Charts (Window -> Charts) — the tree of chart formulas. Double-clicking a name here inserts that indicator as a new pane.

The Window menu also offers a set of specialist panes you will meet later: Interpretation, Real-time Quote, Alert Output, Notepad, Symbol Information, Time and Sales, Log, Data Window and the Risk/Yield map, plus the usual Cascade, Tile Horizontally, Tile Vertically, Normal and Floating window commands.

✦Tip

View -> Refresh All re-reads the formula folder and every category in the symbol tree. You need it whenever you have added or edited an .afl file with an editor outside AmiBroker — otherwise your new formula does not appear in the Charts tree and you will conclude, wrongly, that saving it failed.

Chart panes and chart sheets

A chart pane is one formula drawing into one horizontal band of a chart window. The price chart is a pane. An RSI plot underneath it is another pane.

To add one, find the indicator in the Charts list and double-click its name, or use Insert from its context menu. To close one, click the pane and then either View -> Pane -> Close, or right-click the pane and choose Close, or use the Close button in the small menu at the pane’s top-right corner. The same View -> Pane submenu also offers Arrange All, Move Up, Move Down, Maximize and Restore.

A chart sheet is, in the guide’s own words, “a set of chart panes (with indicators) displayed within a single frame”. Sheets exist so you can flip between whole indicator sets instantly instead of adding and removing panes. A default installation ships with four sheet tabs — which is why people assume four is the maximum. It is not: the guide states you can have up to 60 different indicator sets, and the actual number is set in Tools -> Preferences on the Charting tab.

!Important

The Preferences setting that governs the sheet count takes effect after a restart. Raise it, close AmiBroker, reopen it, and only then look for the extra tabs. Note also that the two official pages label the same setting differently — one calls it “Number of chart sheets” and the other “Maximum number of chart sheets”. They are the same control.

Right-clicking the chart is not optional

A large amount of AmiBroker’s chart functionality is reachable only by right-clicking the chart itself. Parameters — the dialog controlling every configurable value in every pane — is there and is not on any main menu. So is the Template submenu. If you spend five minutes hunting a main menu for something chart-related, right-click the chart.

Templates: the set of sheets

The complete set of chart sheets is called a template. Right-click the chart to reach Template -> Save, Template -> Save as default and Template -> Load.... The default template is what a newly created window starts from.

There are two template formats, and the difference is worth understanding before you pick one.

The old local format stores window sizes and the paths to the formulas. It is small, and it is what the guide recommends for storing templates on your own machine.

The newer .chart format — “Chart Template, Complete (*.chart)” in the Files of type combo — additionally stores the text of the formulas themselves, as XML. It is intended for porting charts between computers, and for archiving, because everything travels in one file.

⚠Warning

Loading a .chart file has a behaviour that catches people. For every formula stored inside it, AmiBroker checks the target machine: if no such formula exists it creates one; if an identical one exists it does nothing; if a different formula with the same name exists, it creates a new file with an _imported.afl suffix and points the pane at that instead. Your original is never overwritten — but you end up with duplicate formulas you did not ask for, and a chart that is quietly using the copy rather than the file you have been editing.

Include files travel inside the .chart too. If a different include file already exists, AmiBroker asks whether to replace it; replacing makes a .bak of the old one.

Layouts: the set of windows

A window layout is “a complete set of multiple windows open, each with a different symbol, display interval, size, and set of chart sheets”. Since version 4.20 you can have an unlimited number of them, switched by double-clicking a name in the Layouts pane. Right-clicking the Layouts tree gives you Open, Save, Save As and Delete.

What a layout stores, exactly as documented: window sizes and positions, maximized or minimized state, the chart panes available on each sheet independently for each window, the selected bar interval, the selected symbol, and the selected chart sheet.

Two properties of layouts cause almost all layout confusion.

Local layouts are per-database; global layouts are visible from every database. On disk, the local default lives in a Layouts folder inside the database directory, while the global default lives in a Layouts folder inside the main AmiBroker directory. If you saved a layout while one database was open and cannot find it after switching databases, it was saved local. That is a design decision, not a bug — per-database layouts are what let an intraday database open with an intraday arrangement and an end-of-day database with a daily one.

Automatic saving is a preference, and it can be off. Tools -> Preferences, Miscellaneous tab, Save on exit: Layouts. With it off, the arrangement you spent an hour building disappears silently when you close the program.

✕Common mistake

The most common version of this failure is: build a beautiful four-window arrangement, close AmiBroker, reopen it, find the default screen, and conclude AmiBroker “does not remember anything”. Two things fix it — turn on Save on exit: Layouts, and save the layout explicitly under a name rather than relying on the automatic save. Do both.

Layers: visibility for hand drawings

Layers apply to hand-drawn objects — trend lines, Fibonacci studies, rectangles — and the guide describes them as “like pieces of transparent plastic”. They let you show and hide groups of drawings without deleting anything.

Five layers are built in and cannot be removed: Default layer, which is always visible, plus Intraday layer, Daily layer, Weekly layer and Monthly layer. The four interval layers start locked to their intervals, meaning their visibility follows the current chart interval and their checkbox cannot be clicked. Right-clicking gives you Add layer, Remove layer, Show all layers, Hide all layers, Toggle, Unlock built-in layers, Lock built-in layers and Properties.

The workflow has an order that is easy to get wrong: select the layer first by clicking its name, then draw. Every subsequent drawing lands on the selected layer. You can reassign a drawing afterwards from its properties box, but doing it right the first time is quicker.

✕Common mistake

Layer properties hold a separate visibility setting for each interval, and the properties box always opens showing “monthly” regardless of the current interval. That is a startup condition of the dialog, not a statement about where you are. To finish configuring a locked layer you have to walk every entry in the Interval combo and set show or hide for each one. Show all, Hide all and Toggle act on non-locked layers only, which is why they sometimes appear to do nothing.

Layer definitions live in a text file called broker.layers. Deleting it resets layers to factory defaults, which is a legitimate way out if you have tangled them badly.

The Analysis window

Analysis -> New Analysis, or File -> New -> New Analysis, or the New Tab button. This is the window in which every scan, exploration, backtest and optimization in the rest of the course runs. It replaced the older Automatic Analysis window in version 5.50 and is multi-threaded.

The controls that matter, and what each actually does:

Control	What it does
Apply to	All symbols, Current symbol, or Filter
Filter	Opens the Filter Settings window, used when Apply to = Filter
Range	All quotations, N recent bars, N recent days, or From-To dates
Settings	Backtester settings; its drop-down toggles chart sync, wait for backfill and auto-repeat
Report	The last backtest’s report; its drop-down opens the Report Explorer
Optimize	Runs an optimization; its drop-down offers Walk-Forward and the 3D chart

Several small behaviours are worth knowing now because they look like faults when you meet them cold. Multiple Analysis windows may be open and running simultaneously. Results can be scrolled and sorted while they are still being generated. The Range field’s N-recent-days entry is edited by selecting 1 recent day(s) and typing the number you want — the text updates itself. And the 3D Optimization Chart requires exactly two optimization parameters, so it is unavailable with one or with three.

✱AmiBroker Professional required

The Analysis window is where the edition difference bites hardest in day-to-day work. The Standard edition runs up to 2 simultaneous threads per Analysis window; the Professional edition up to 32. The actual count also depends on your logical processor count and how many symbols are under test. Nothing is unavailable on Standard — scans, explorations, backtests, optimization and walk-forward all run — but a large optimization takes proportionally longer.

The Formula Editor

Analysis -> Formula Editor. Modern AmiBroker’s editor has syntax highlighting, brace matching, auto-indentation, code folding, in-line error reporting, a line-number margin, auto-complete in immediate and on-demand modes, parameter tooltips, code snippets, bookmarks, Find in Files and an integrated visual debugger.

The details that save time:

• Auto-complete is Ctrl+Space in on-demand mode. In immediate mode the list appears as you type the first character. Accept with Return; Escape dismisses.
• Context help is F1. Put the caret inside or immediately after a function name and press F1 to open that function’s reference page. This is the fastest route into the AFL reference there is, and you should use it constantly.
• Parameter tooltips appear when you type an opening parenthesis and disappear at the closing one, including for nested calls.
• Ctrl plus the backtick key above Tab is Window -> Toggle Frame, which jumps between the AmiBroker main frame and the editor frame. Essential when the editor vanishes behind the main window.
• Bookmarks: Ctrl+F2 sets or removes, F2 goes to the next, Shift+F2 the previous.
• Find in Files (Edit -> Find in Files) prints results into the Output window as path\file.afl(line): contents; double-click a line to open that file in a new tab.
• Edit -> Line Comment toggles // on every selected line, and toggles it back off when run again.

!Important

Apply indicator and Insert chart are not the same command. Apply indicator puts the formula on the current chart once. Tools -> Insert chart inserts it many times, as multiple panes. Choosing the second when you meant the first is how people end up with six identical RSI panes.

Your own formulas appear in the Charts tree only if you save the .afl file into the Formulas subfolder of the main AmiBroker directory. And a caution that costs people work: formulas that ship with AmiBroker are overwritten by the next upgrade. If you modify one, save it under a new name or in your own subfolder.

Docking and customising

Every pane can be dragged by its caption bar; docking stickers appear to show where it will land. Drag a pane’s tab to tear it off. Hold Ctrl while dragging to force a window or tab to float rather than dock. Each docking window has a pin button in its upper-right corner: unpin it and the pane auto-hides when it loses focus, which is how you reclaim screen space without closing anything.

Tools -> Customize handles toolbars, menus and keyboard shortcuts. Buttons can be reordered in customization mode, edit and combo fields such as the ticker box can be resized, and there is a built-in image editor for making your own buttons. The Appearance page holds Show MDI tabs and a Dark mode for list views checkbox — which affects owner-drawn list views only, not dialogs.

✦Tip

If a menu item that the documentation describes is simply missing after an upgrade — the Watch List commands are the guide’s own example — the fix is Tools -> Customize, select Menu Bar, and press Reset. Customised menus do not automatically gain newly added items.

One naming trap remains from older documentation. Window -> New and Window -> New Linked no longer exist. They are now File -> New -> Default Chart and File -> New -> Linked Chart. Several official pages still print the old paths, and so do most forum posts written before the change.

What changed in your understanding

You now have the vocabulary the rest of the course uses: pane, sheet, template, layout, layer, and the two different rows of tabs. You know which container holds which thing, and therefore what you have to save to keep a given piece of work — a template preserves your sheets, a layout preserves your windows, and neither preserves the other.

You also know where the three working windows are, that right-clicking the chart is the route to a large part of the chart’s functionality, and that a handful of settings in Preferences decide whether your arrangement survives closing the program.

Check your understanding

Question 1. You have arranged four chart windows across two monitors, each on a different symbol and interval. What do you save to get that arrangement back tomorrow?

• A template
• A layout
• A chart sheet
• A .chart file

Show the answer and why

Answer: A layout

A layout stores the complete set of open windows including sizes, positions, symbols, intervals and which sheet each window is showing. A template stores only the set of chart sheets within one window, so it would preserve the panes but not the multi-window arrangement.

Question 2. Which of these can you rename? Select all that apply.

• A chart sheet tab at the bottom of the window
• An MDI tab at the top of the window
• A saved layout
• A built-in chart layer

Show the answer and why

Answer: A chart sheet tab at the bottom of the window, A saved layout, A built-in chart layer

MDI tabs are generated from the document itself and cannot be renamed. Sheet tabs are renamed by right-clicking them, layouts by saving under a new name, and layers through their Properties dialog — although the five built-in layers can be renamed but not removed.

Question 3. You save a layout while your intraday database is open, then switch to your end-of-day database. The layout is not in the list. What is the most likely explanation?

• The save silently failed
• It was saved as a local layout, which is per-database
• Layouts only persist while AmiBroker is running
• The end-of-day database does not support layouts

Show the answer and why

Answer: It was saved as a local layout, which is per-database

Local layouts live in a Layouts folder inside the database directory and are visible only from that database; global layouts live in the main AmiBroker directory and are visible everywhere. This is deliberate — it lets each database open with an arrangement that suits its base interval.

Question 4. True or false: the four sheet tabs shown after a fresh installation are the maximum AmiBroker supports.

• True
• False

Show the answer and why

Answer: False

False. Four is simply what ships. The guide states up to 60 indicator sets, with the number set on the Charting tab of Preferences — and that particular setting only takes effect after restarting AmiBroker, which is why raising it appears to do nothing at first.

Check my answersClear