Comment by lindskogen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lindskogen | Hacker News Reader

I have an idea of a terminal emulator where you could maximize panes but using a nested structure, does anyone know of one?

Standard "Zoom" features in tmux or iTerm2 only maximize the single active pane to the full window, hiding everything else. If I have a layout like this:

  _____________________
  |         |    B    |
  |    A    |---------|
  |         |    C    |
  |_________|_________|

And I expand B, I want A to hide, while B and C remain visible together. Then I can create a new nested workspace in there and later zoom out when I’m done.

Maybe this could be done arbitrarily deep?

It's not really what you want but in a similar vein check out: zoom.el

https://github.com/cyrus-and/zoom

I guess it's also the kind of thing where screen real-estate is a must otherwise when you're at the "top-level" it would look weird-ish.

This should be simple any time you have panes in a binary tree split view.

The hard part is the UX: making it clear that we're in a zoom state (esp with nested zooms), somehow showing the split-pane tree so that user knows what container will be filled when they zoom, etc.

Fork ghostty and get claude to one-shot it so you can see if you like the idea.

Wouldn't you want a hide option rather than a fullscreen option? so hide A?

When I use zellij, i just move A to a new tab temporarily

You can do this with i3

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