> The concept of "filesystem" is an increasingly weak concept.

Yeah because Apple has broken that idea over and over and over. The anti-unix unix.

Interesting and expansive post about what the modern desktop experience should be like, and most of it has nothing to do with Tmux except if you squint in some very particular way.

All of his wishes for window management are easily solved with i3 or a similar tiling wm. Even on macOS you can get a shitty version of it with yabai and skhd (both are awesome, it is entirely macos' fault that it still sucks).

Kind of weird that the author does not make clear what a "normal person" is, despite this being a central concept to their article.

Personally I don't think it is normal to be unable to double click on i3wm in some graphical apt wrapper and then pick it from a scroll list at login. People use shortcuts in Windows all the time. Having more than one workspace might have been foreign to most a decade or two ago, but these days external monitors are common and workspaces are basically that.

I've seen people who I would not consider abnormal go from weird misconceptions about i3wm to efficiently sending around windows between workspaces and screens in a day. If you want you can also click your way through it, and configuration is generated for you after you decide whether you want Alt or Super as the core command key. Defaults are rather sensible, so you don't have to fiddle with them until you've got some experience.

Historically user interfaces on web pages and in Windows and Mac OS:s has changed quite a bit and people who I think most would consider normal managed to adapt.

how can this not refer to emacs?

emacs -> screen -> tmux -> tmux integrated into <terminal app>

appears to be the path.

I guess the fork was "emacs before X" to "emacs after X but we retrofiited some ideas from X into the terminal" -> <the rest is history>

Niri or Umbriel with Noctalia shell is a wonderful experience, you can get similar on Mac with OmniWM. I briefly tried komorebi for windows too.

> My notes in Apple Notes belong to Apple Notes, not my filesystem. My texts live in iMessage's database, not my Documents folder.

This is why as a Mac user I don't use those apps. Nor do I use Photos or whatever iTunes is called now. I've been burned too many times by having my work locked away in some kind of proprietary Apple database. Yes, you can usually export stuff but that's not a solution. You export your library on Day 1, do some work, and then export it again on Day 2. Quick, what changed? Where's the primary source of truth?

File systems are universal and files are portable. Any app that uses a proprietary database as its primary source of truth is an app I won't be using.

I solved exactly that problem I and I sell it to those willing: https://race-term.com

It is multiplexer so survives app kills, and interface is heavily keyboard driven.

I tried running email in it though resigned (and guess what, wrote my own) because HTML email support is must have nowadays.

Interesting idea. My problem is that one “stream” usually spans multiple apps that silo data. So i have an email from a client and command line and a tab in chrome and maybe a note and an excel file. There are of course exceptions to this, but in real life we bring tools to the project not the other way around. Naturally some “projects” might have sub projects, or some might be transient - a quick email reply. You might organize your digital life this way - with virtual desktops, but why can’t the computer keep track?

Too bad config is a no go for the poster, otherwise hyprland or i3 would do everything, even the quake overlay.

Actually for me it's different.

I've been using Tmux and later Zellij for many years, while I was on Ubuntu's Unity, then Gnome, KDE, i3 and lastly sway.

Until I switched to niri (https://github.com/niri-wm/niri) ... since then I haven't used tmux at all.

Very weird, come to think of.

Whatever direction this line of inquiry goes, the compositor / window manager split that Isaac Freund and company built into River [0] is the future and would be the perfect platform on which people could build the environments that explore it. Freund's blog post "Separating the Wayland Compositor and Window Manager" [1] and the talk of the same name (linked in the post) are awesome. The list of compatible WM's [2] grows by the day. [3]

[0] https://codeberg.org/river/river

[1] https://isaacfreund.com/blog/river-window-management/

[2] https://codeberg.org/river/wiki/src/branch/main/pages/wm-lis...

[3] I even had Claude vibe-code one for me based on a Dfns / tacit-where-possible style of APL, heavily commented so I could learn some new stuff about APL. I haven't shared it publicly since River has a no-LLM policy and I want to respect that.

I very nearly didn't check this out because I didn't realise the focus was going to be much more general OS, but it's a great piece, well thought through.

Vertical tabs is a feature in some modern browsers (all?), toggled in settings

Virtual desktops might help some people where you just ctrl+alt+left/right to move to them, instead of multiple monitors (where applicable). Or just fullscreen apps and I think it's like ctrl+tab to switch between a bunch of them

The only way to keep all the files on the filesystem is probably to avoid the silos

I guess we could ironically / unironically ask AI for some OS design tips for our setups haha

> The best two examples of this are the Arc browser and Chrome OS. But I think Arc is actually the more interesting of the two experiments. Their first innovation was to break the idea of tabs at the top and instead move it to be a sidebar model.

I will forever hate Arc for popularizing vertical tabs the way they did.

Vertical tabs were a thing since at least the Tree Style Tabs extension (2007), except the Tree Style Tabs were infinitely cooler, because they were a tree, not a list, and right click->open in new tab, would open the new tab as a child of the current tab.

So you could have a hacker news tab during your break, start opening a bunch of articles, read through them, simply un-expand the HN sub-tree, go to work, and then re-expand it during your next break.

Because of Arc, everyone is now implementing vertical tabs, but no one is implementing Tree Style Tabs, and, probably no one ever will again.

You could put it as PID 1 (with a small amount of modifications), you could put it as login shell (with a small amount of modifications), you could put it in your shell login script, or you could just do tmux a whenever you log in and tmux is already running. You can also save tmux sessions via a plugin. You can also configure each tmux window to open a specific program.

With tmux as an OS, you end up with a TUI web browser (there are several). While you can watch pictures and videos in a terminal, and vim keybinds are strong in a TUI web browser (reducing a learning curve), I wouldn't want the option to run a GUI web browser to be unavailable. So it makes more sense to have a tiling WM/DE, where with one keybind you to your terminal being fullscreen to your terminal multiplexer. But sometimes you want it floating! Then you put it (back) to floating. I also think that you can set up sway pretty much like tmux, except for the resuming/session part. Although my sway config (back when I ran sway) had an auto start of different windows with different applications.

Rooms 1986 project reminds me of Project Looking Glass [1] (or rather: the other way around). Rooms probably also inspired SGI IRIX' fsv (as seen in the movie Hackers from 1995), and Doom as a file manager. Still, I think the 3D exploration of your computer is neat. I don't know if VR glasses allow for this (they probably do), and I also don't know whether the sacrifice (it costs money, and you lose vision of your surroundings) is worth it. As such, I'm usually reminded AR is the better option, except if you want to be fully immersed. Which you very well might want to be while working.

Now, is all of this necessary? Opinion. I believe the macOS HIG is already so good (with other HIGs getting closer) that the answer is no. And for a quick terminal, you can just have a quake-like keybind (Ctrl + ~). On macOS, too, there's multiple ways to add tiling.

(There's also zellij, tmux clone written in Rust with sane defaults.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Looking_Glass

This topic is similar to jigs in woodworking - you can get all fancy and over-engineer it but in the end, does it improve the product/output? If a fancy jig and a gross looking home-made jig both produce a 90 degree corner, what is the added benefit?

I think people put way too much emphasis on things like this with conclusions that they are faster and therefore its better. There is Pareto's law and a point of no return on invested time with this type of endeavor. I would feel better if people started off with "I did this because I can and I like doing things like this" vs. some argument that its better in some way.

Many of these problems were already considered and solved by Xah Lee. Watch some of his videos on window management. You will see that tiling or docking windows are always suboptimal. You only need a good set of shortcuts to switching between windows so that you use the mouse less. I also have shortcuts bound to resizing windows to fixed sizes. This is all I am going to tell you. Figure out the rest.

Persistence is something I care about, Tmux allow that between different sessions, local or otherwise, Windows Remote Desktop also makes it simple to continue work remotely. What bothers me is that the OS will eventually need to reboot, and the user is expected to reconfigure the sessions afterwards, at least partially.

I think a modern computer should be able to update its software, kernel included, in a way that the state of the userland could be kept, even with an actual reboot.

I like articles that discuss out of ordinary approaches. This is one of those, and I relate to the pain the writer also has.

However...

> Different people use windows totally differently.

The older I get, the more impatient I am with this. In the industry, we normalized that high paid software developers (who are way better programmers, or infra people than I am) waste hundreds of engineering hours with their absolutely broken window management, and command-tab hell. Whenever I have to witness a screenshare of a colleague, my time is also wasted.

I wish this would be an interview gating: show us how you manage yourself in this big monorepo, switching tasks, windows, tabs, desktops, SSHs etc. Do not normalize noob time wasting.

Different people also use pianos differently. Yet, we don't appreciate a noob pushing random keys around it. It would be unpleasant to the ear, just how unpleasant (painful) it is to witness macOSs/gnomes bubblegum horror of sloppily animated chaos.

Back to my point: windows (as in viewports) are with us for many decades. I don't care if you tile, stack, infinite scroll them. Just be productive. Invest upfront in learning, be fast, and be able to explain what I you try to show me on screen.

There will be no one size fits for all, and that part I understand. But please have more dexterity with your desktop abilities than my grandma.

This talk about "the future" is nonsense. UI is art, not engineering. What some love, others will inevitably hate. This is where unix/linux is light-years ahead of the competition. Unlike Windows/OSX/iOS, you can make your own mixtape.

That, and Steve Jobs died a long-ass time ago. The hand-wringing over "config files" in the age of qwen3 you can run on a 10-year-old GPU is no longer as relevant as it once was. Language got us this far. The checkboxes and picklists of PARC were a detour that is now (thankfully) in our rear-view mirror. Config files are awesome.

t. i3 user

Love the one-person stack energy. A small, known surface you can rebuild from muscle memory beats a pile of half-configured GUIs when you’re shipping solo.

I was wondering who would use small LLM to improve layout, selection and switching of windows.. pretty fun.

My answer to this: EXWM or Ratpoison

So, a tiling WM?

Or use a twm

nvim has all the functions of tmux and also it has an editor.

Make nvim the OS

Love it. High recognition factor. The only things that matter this side of the AI-revolution is window management

> I don't have a single fucking clue how MacOS populates this window

Nobody does, but it’s provocative! Gets the people going!

I’ve leaned into Aerospace for window management, herdr for terminal and good ol’ Chrome for browsing.

I put my hope to Superlogical by the Ghostty-guy to solve all my MUX problems

> Filesystems as a weak abstraction.

Is a concept the author needs to get over.

> The ideal would be "across my entire computer and applications, what are the recent files I have interacted with" and expand that out to include emails and Teams/Slacks and everything. I should be able to see everything going on with my machine, search through it and not care if its stored inside of Slack or iCloud or whatever. Single pane of glass.

Nope. This would be great if it worked.

This idea of getting rid of the file system is very old, tired and has failed. And failed. And failed.

…and you know apps hate? Letting you out of their walled gardens.

> Microsoft tried it, people didn't like it,

Yup.

> but I think the concept makes sense.

Nope.

You’re going to have to do better than trying this again.

Something something local LLM? Mm.

It’s a Hard Problem. The kind of problem that random engineers look at and go “doesn’t seem that hard, I could do that in a weekend”.

…

> In the interest of full disclosure I think this is gonna take many weekends of work to even get a functional demo running. So I'll do my best, but be patient.

Okay, to be fair, the author did acknowledge that it’s a lot of work and it’s hard; and I look forward to seeing the result, because experiments in this space are interesting, the idea of a visual tmux maybe has some legs…

…but I think this project is too ambitious to succeed.

Not being the default isn't what stops these concept desktops from taking off; it’s that people don’t like them.

No file system, you just get “tasks” and an LLM to pray to and hope you get your data from?

:/ I don’t think it’ll fly.

To be clear, I'm not a UI/UX designer.

Just be clear, FFS. These parasitic innuendos are annoying. Be frank while you are at it and tbh jic.

I stopped reading after that.

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