Changing default orientation of the request panel?

Hello SoapUI community, I hope this post finds you well.

I find that every time I want to use SoapUI to test out a web service, I click the button to change the orientation of the pane to split horizontally instead of vertically.

I do not believe there is a way to set this as a default preference (at least in 3.0.1).  Can I script the UI to always do this for me or simply recompile the class that represents the panel UI to better fit my needs (if so, I've no idea which file defines the panel, some help would be appreciated)?

Thanks so much for your time.