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.
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.
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 :(
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.
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.)
26 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 66.8 ms ] threadIt would be so nice to run remotely, and on a light Dev system.
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.
It is one of many features that makes me stick with it
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 :(
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.
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
Fluxbox (fork from blackbox, a sibling/cousin to openbox) did this over 20 years ago ...
There's one on Windows, that has the tabs feature: https://losttech.software/stack.html
Disclaimer: I made it.
(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_...