A terminal with UI like visual code | Hacker News Reader

A terminal with UI like visual code

github.com

57 pointszebulon7501823 comments

What really bothers me when I see a project like this is that the window manager should be able to do that with every application, in a standard way.

Docking, tabbing, window-splitting, switching between the windows organized this way should be a standard feature, much like resizing, going full-screen, dragging, minimization, etc are.

I can't believe I'm the first person to come up with this idea, so I wonder what historical precedents are there. I can't remember any :(

Don't worry, you are not the first person to think of this. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_window_manager or even start reading at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_manager

My conjecture is hierarchy.

I remember that when I was young, most applications didn't have tabs; instead they just spawn new windows. Then, people wanted tabs, so programmers made tabs. From some point of view, a bar of tabs is just a less capable version of the taskbar/dock, and it even takes an extra row of screen estate. But what it provides, is a nice hierarchy: This is the window of MS Word, where I have 3 documents opened. This is the window of my Browser, where I have 5 websites opened.

Now that they have tabs, people demand more flexibility of their tabs, and that's why we have all the docking/splitting features within the applications. They are simply the extension of tabs.

Technically, a window manager can do all that, including the hierarchy. I could envision a WM that allows you to group windows together into tabs or sub-windows. I think Microsoft did something like that with tabs, but I don't know how popular it was/is.

Nevertheless, it now requires the user to design their own hierarchy and grouping of windows, which is a lot mental energy into a task that is unimportant for most people. It's not as simple as having tabs that huddle inside applications by themselves.

I'd imagine that a WM with such capability must be designed with a innovative and well-thought-out UX.

> Technically, a window manager can do all that, including the hierarchy. I could envision a WM that allows you to group windows together into tabs or sub-windows. I think Microsoft did something like that with tabs, but I don't know how popular it was/is.

Haiku definitely does this (and apparently even the original BeOS did), although for all that the window headers even look like tabs I never stumbled upon it until I saw it mentioned in the manual[1]. I also don’t think it does anything special when the windows in such a group spawn new ones, which would probably be half the joy in such a tiling-like interface (probably because its WM doesn’t really have a notion of a window spawning another one, so if the same application has two of its windows in different such groups and then creates a third one, the WM can’t really tell where the third one should go).

Crackpot idea: go all the way to tree-style tabs[2] and move history into the window manager, too. With enough (probably too much) imagination you could even see how Miller columns[3] would emerge.

[1] https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/gui.html#stack-ti...

[2] https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_columns

> I could envision a WM that allows you to group windows together into tabs or sub-windows.

Fluxbox (fork from blackbox, a sibling/cousin to openbox) did this over 20 years ago ...

> I could envision a WM that allows you to group windows together into tabs

There's one on Windows, that has the tabs feature: https://losttech.software/stack.html

Disclaimer: I made it.

Random historical fact: the Windows taskbar was originally a (top) tab bar[1], and in fact the pre-Windows 2000 taskbar is just a tab control with the TCS_BUTTONS style.

(Not that tabs are necessarily a good metaphor for how top-level window switching in Windows works.)

[1] http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20030912_057_...

If you like the UX of visual code , h aterminal with UI like visual code

I'd love an IDE with a terminal UI just like VS Code.

It would be so nice to run remotely, and on a light Dev system.

You could start from the RHIDE interface, that's still maintained as part of the FreeDOS extras. That's basically a variety of the old DOS text-mode programming environments.

Yeah I know Rhide! I didn't know it was still maintained, I thought it was deprecated in 2002.

It used to peg my cpu to 100% though back in the day when I used it. Hope they fixed that.

But I'd love something more modern.

I will be that guy: Emacs can be used with the GUI and terminal with more or less the same experience.

It is one of many features that makes me stick with it

There are a few pitfalls to that, for example you need a special incantation to enable terminal-mode mouse support. And if you try to use GUI-oriented features in the terminal, the UI is clunky and not really optimized to the standards of actual TUI widgets.

Thanks, I've never even looked at emacs to be honest. I'll give it a try.

Thank's for your comment . with X11 you can launch remotely , or I don't understand.

Nice! I might even steal a few ideas if/when I ever get round to updating my attempt at something similar: https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/gush :-)

Impressive bit of work. I wish it used KDE's Konsole widget though, instead of an old fork of it. I value interface unification highly.

Tilix is similar.

Thank's for Tilix , interesting I don't know , but vcterm is Qt lib , and Tilix is gnome. I know only Qt , not gnome. ( please no troll :) )

Tilix uses GTK, it doesn't require Gnome.

Yes, I tried it , it seems really good . I mentioned it on the github page. Thank's for the information.

This should be marked a Show HN: , since it looks like you're the creator.

logged in to upvote you

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