Drafts + Safari Split View on iPad: A Practical Guide

You can use Drafts and Safari together in Split View on iPad by opening Safari, swiping up from the Dock to grab Drafts, and dragging it to either side of the screen — giving you a live browser and a ready writing surface at the same time.

Once you have both apps open side by side, the combination is genuinely hard to beat for any task that involves reading and writing at the same time. Safari handles all your source material while Drafts stays ready for text without any friction — no waiting for a document to load, no navigating menus. You type, it captures.

Why Drafts and Safari work well together

The pairing works because the two apps have complementary jobs. Safari is purely for consuming and navigating web content. Drafts is purely for capturing and manipulating text. Neither app tries to do what the other does, so there is no overlap and no clutter.

Here are three workflows where this split earns its keep:

• Research and note-taking: Open a Wikipedia article, a documentation page, or a long-form piece in Safari, then pull key facts, quotes, or ideas directly into a Drafts note as you read. No copy-paste juggling between full-screen apps.
• Writing from a brief: Keep a client brief, style guide, or reference document open in Safari while you draft copy, emails, or social posts in Drafts. You can glance left and type right without losing your place in either app.
• Link logging: When you are curating resources — for a newsletter, a reading list, or a research document — grab URLs from Safari and paste them into Drafts with annotations. Drafts can then send that list anywhere: Notion, Obsidian, email, or a plain text file.

The Split View ratio also matters here. If you are doing heavy reading with light notes, push Safari to the wider two-thirds. If you are drafting seriously and only glancing at a reference, give Drafts the bigger share.

How to set it up with Splicon

The only frustrating thing about Split View pairs is re-creating them every time. If you use Drafts and Safari together regularly, it is worth turning the combination into a single Home Screen icon. If you have not already, Download Splicon free from the App Store.

1. Open Splicon and search for Drafts and Safari. Select them as your pair. Splicon pulls in their real app icons so the shortcut is immediately recognizable on your Home Screen.
2. Choose a split style — you can set which app appears on which side — then generate the combined icon and save it to your Photos library.
3. Open the Shortcuts app, create a new shortcut, and add an "Open App" action configured to open both apps in Split View. When prompted to choose an icon, import the image you just saved from Splicon.
4. Add the shortcut to your Home Screen using the share button inside Shortcuts. It will sit on your Home Screen like any other app icon.

From that point on, one tap opens Safari and Drafts exactly as you configured them — correct sides, correct split ratio — without any dragging or Dock hunting.

A note on using the pair effectively

Drafts has a URL scheme and can receive text from Shortcuts actions, so if you want to go further, you can build automations that pre-load a Drafts template when you open the pair. That is optional. The basic Split View setup alone removes enough friction to make the workflow noticeably faster, particularly if you write on your iPad every day.