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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

If I can have it as a sidebar to the web browser, this actually solves multiple problems, biggest of which is screens themselves.

Someone, somewhen, had that bright idea of popularizing 16:9 and 16:10 screens, which are now de-facto standard, and that leads to huge amounts of screen estate being wasted. Most of the users (i.e. those not using tiling window managers on Linux systems) don't have proper tools to manage screen space, and especially web browsers when maximized waste most of it.

So TLDR; yeah, I could use a messenger tab side by side with rest of the browser tabs, because I have a shit ton of useless screen space with a maximized browser window.

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There's nothing stopping you having a messenger window and a browser window open side by side. You don't have to combine disparate applications into a single application just to show them both on the screen at once.

True, if your WM doesn't suck, which rules out Windows and MacOS (ok, for the former someone wrote a tiling WM overlay in... AutoHotkey). Otherwise it's annoying hassle to keep the windows properly sized and displayed.

And for the latter, you have Moom, kwm, amethyst, divvy, Better(Snap|Touch)Tool, Slate, Breeze, etc.

Divvy also works on Windows. So this covers the former as well. Plus there are other options [1].

The fact that this keeps coming up makes me think that people have forgotten how customizable the desktop experience can be. Unlike iOS/Android you're not tied down to what the app designer thought a good layout is when organizing your windows.

[1] http://alternativeto.net/software/divvy/?platform=windows

Things must have changed over the years. I remember that back in times of 2003 and XP, the windowing experience wasn't really that customizable; people were trying to replace explorer.exe with custom "shells", but those were always buggy and easily crashed. I guess I gave up on the whole space after that.

Windows has some tiling features built-in these days (enough to tile a messenger side-by-side with a browser). Winkey+Left/Right (or do a web search for "snap assistant").

I know about those, but I wouldn't say it's enough - it only works in screen halves. Good messenger/browser split is at least 1:2.

I did check out AlexandrB's suggestion of WindowGrid[0] and it works very nice; I'm now using it on my Windows machine at work.

[0] - http://windowgrid.net/

Rotate it 90 degrees. 16:9 then becomes 9:16 which is a dream come true for coding for example.

I have exactly this setup. My left monitor is portrait, showing my 109 lines of code at a time, 119 characters on a line. If I ever have to deal with longer lines a keyboard shortcut moves the terminal window to the landscape monitor and VIM automatically resizes the content.

Is it? When I've tried that, I've found it impossible to do without placing some, perhaps most, of the panel above my eyeline, which is a recipe for neck pain.

It is not. It is too thin. I have done it.

It is also too thin to read comic books. Wasted space at the bottom.

Yep, that's why I always buy 16:10 or 4:3 monitors, which work fine vertically to read PDFs which is my main activity as an academic...

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