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Comment by 20after4 | Hacker News Reader

This looks really interesting and well thought out. Nonetheless, I feel like the OS window manager should provide this kind of experience, with appropriate hooks so that an IDE can implement this sort of experience with native windows.

I really liked using PaperWM¹ for a while, however, I'm still waiting for it to get more stable.

Another system that is sort of similar to this concept, Pipeworld² (part of the Arcan project) is an impressive research UI experiment which is a bit too far out for my daily use.

1. https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM?tab=readme-ov-file#paperw... 2. https://arcan-fe.com/2021/04/12/introducing-pipeworld/

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Not related to the main thread, but I want to mention that as a display server, Arcan is superior to everything else out there (x11, Wayland and whatever proprietary software is used in Mac/windows).

To make things even more impressive, it is:

- Also a game engine

- Also a multimedia Framework/Library

- Implemented over the course of many years as a side project of a single programmer.

It is one of the most impressive projects I've seen (if not the most impressive) and the dev is a true genius of software design and hard work.

throwaway account due to my employer but - https://lobste.rs/s/w3zkxx/lobsters_interview_with_bjorn_sta... .. the definition of true grit ..

> I feel like the OS window manager should provide this kind of experience

GIMP (the OSS Photoshop-style tool) had this idea for literally over a decade and eventually gave up on it because they never got it to work well.

The issue is that for GIMP it didn't really serve a particularly obvious function, and it was very different to what users of other software expected

They didn't give up on it, they simply added alternative options for those that didn't like it.

As far as I know the old mode is also no longer the default. At least it isn't in Fedora and in GIMP's own release notes they also don't use the old mode [1]

[1] https://www.gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-2.10.html

OS windows are a hindrance for any workflow needing semi-permanent layout. It's ok to place two or three monolithic apps side by side, and maybe to pull apart separate working sessions at different virtual spaces. It also requires constant bookkeping to clean up all the individual windows you no longer need.

That's very different from a spatial layout, where you can juxtapose related code elements near each other, and they remain in those places for as long as you're using them, and then get rid of all them together by closing their common container.

There have been attempts to create new, more spatial work styles on window managers, but the industry is too set in their ways on how windows should be managed, and WMs are complex beasts with many moving parts. So it's usually better to keep those experimental tools self-contained within their own window or app.

Alright, I have a mismatched setup: a 1080p and a 4K screen. No matter how you twist it, the virtual screen* will have dead zones. Self-management of a single full-screen canvas is easy (browser F11). But then I will want to use the entire physical screen estate with the editor and it'll end up re-implementing large parts of the window manager just to position the windows where they belong, rendering at the correct monitor DPI.

Further, just from the shown animation I can already see the same problems you'd encounter with a lot of screen space and old style window managers: you grow tired _very fast_ of moving and resizing additional windows yourself to fit more on the screen. "Maximize (on current screen)" is the only automation step in this direction and it is decades old. Windows' "snap to edges" is a semi-manual attempt at assisted window management.

* in Win32 terms, a rectangle encompassing the entire region with all visible screens

This is exactly the kind of window manager I've had in mind for years for the OS I'm making. Glad others feel similarly. Here's to hoping I get that far!

Arcan seems like https://strlen.com/treesheets/ for the OS-level.

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