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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who thinks that "tabs" should really be handled by the window manager, rather than by the application?

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I don't think so: I have a number of programs that support tabs or multiple groups of windows in some form, including my editors (Emacs/Vim), browser (GNU IceCat), and terminal multiplexer (GNU screen). It can be argued that each of those are window managers in their own right, but what this does is provide distinct points of context that I can switch between and ignore.

I also use a tiling window manager (Xmonad); it would not be realistic for my window manager to handle tabbing, as that would prevent me from tiling my browser.

I also have dozens (sometimes hundreds) of tabs open in my browser, which I arrange hierarchically using the Tree Style Tab addon, which I find incredibly useful and essential to how I use and understand the Web (...and my train of thought as to how I got 10 levels deep into Wikipedia and various other sites while trying to research something completely unrelated...).

I'm not saying that this rationale works for everyone; this is what works for me, and I like it.

> I also use a tiling window manager (Xmonad); it would not be realistic for my window manager to handle tabbing, as that would prevent me from tiling my browser.

But you could tile your browsers that have what would have been in your tabs. Except then you'd have a lot of heavyweight browser instances running. Too bad a browser instance isn't more like a tab, using common resources provided by a browser master process with no UI.

> Except then you'd have a lot of heavyweight browser instances running.

On any decent OS, browsers will all share their executable code in memory. So I'm not sure what exactly the problem is.

Huh, you're right. I never realized.

Informal experiment, Linux Mint:

  - 0.7G mem used, no FF, 1TBird, 1 URXVT
  - 1.1G with 1 FF an one tab
  - 1.2G with 10 FF, one tab each
  - 1.2G with 1FF and ten empty tabs
  - 1.37G with 1FF and 17 active tabs.

Well I, for one, wish that my editor didn't have built-in window management functionality and relied on an external window manager. And I don't use the window management features of multiplexers, although I did before I used a tiling window manager.

I'm curious why you think having your window manager handle tabs would prevent you from "tiling" your browser. I use i3 with a web browser that doesn't support tabbed browsing (surf). For basic web browsing I just throw a bunch of surf windows into an i3 tabbed container, but for more complex tasks I can tile my browser however I want. I can place complex tiling arrangements inside of the tabbed container that I use for regular web browsing, and I can place that tabbed container inside of another tiling arrangement.

Hierarchical tabs is a thing that I miss in i3, and someday I'll write a patch. Thats a reasonable complaint, but also one that would be a non-issue if everyone magically agreed that window management should be the domain of a single global window manager, because then you would have hierarchical vertical tabs, and you could use them for more than just your web browser (for example you might put a terminal window within your web browser tab hierarchy to group it with the browser tabs that are contextually related to it).

> I'm curious why you think having your window manager handle tabs would prevent you from "tiling" your browser.

For example, I have this arrangement on one of my monitors:

  .---------.------.
  |         |   A  |
  | Browser |-------
  |         |   B  |
  `---------`------`

If I have more, it continues in a Fibonacci spiral. But this is a very simple layout, and easy to understand. If I add a dozen windows where I would normally have tabs in Browser, then I'm in an awkward situation, because I only want a single tab displayed in Browser at a time. I'd have to write some window layout that will know to completely hide certain windows rather than tiling them.

I'm not sure I'm understanding your setup correctly, but is this what you mean http://i.imgur.com/dlheReA.png ?

The browser area is tabbed, and only shows one page at a time, the terminals tile.

Since my i3 isn't configured for this setup it took some finessing to get things into position, but it was intuitive, at least for someone that's been using these keybindings for some months. If I used this layout often I could save the layout and make a keybinding to automatically put windows in position.

I don't know how Xmonad handles tabs, it seems more focused on a pure-tiling experience.

> I don't know how Xmonad handles tabs,

Your layout is essentially what I'm referring to.

I now understand what you're saying; yes, I use Xmonad exclusively for tiling, but from my understanding it does support some degree of tabbing.

i3 looks very interesting, though; I think I might have to research it a bit.

Thanks for the discussion. :)

EDIT: Okay, I've spent about 15m reading documentation and playing with it a little bit, and I'm sold. On the WM, that is; I'm not so sure about dropping tabs in browsers just yet, but I can see how you'd want that, and how it might even work well.

...so damn you; I'm going to be very tired in the morning playing around with this thing!

You could switch from a purely tiling window manager to one that supports both tiling and tabbed containers, like i3.

There are far too many times a day that I find myself hitting > alt-tab > sigh > shift-alt-tab > ctrl-tab

I'm not a "keep all the tabs open forever" person, so having the ability to shift this to the O/S would be great. Can see why this would be sub-optimal for someone who regularly has 30+ plus tabs open at once.

Could I make a suggestion, from a "keep all the tabs open forever" person? Try to come up with a personal standard of which tab is where -- or at least where you put certain types of tab -- so you aren't just searching through everything, or toggling back between the last two or three items, but picking the one you want in one exact motion. For example: personal window in the top right with the first tab chat and the second tab e-mail; bug reports go on the left with the one you're currently doing on the far left; searches for programming help usually are centre-to-right with the left tab for google, and all the other tabs for the results... It's not an exact science (you don't need to write a program in your head that determines where to put each window) but I find I can trust my instincts on where I put something most of the time.

(That's how I work and I still hit the wrong window a lot, so take this advice with a heaping bowl of salt)

The key thing is being able to open a tab/window in the background, when everything I know of automatically tries to bring any new window to the front. But I do agree with your point: every application seems to be re-inventing its own window/tab/document management instead of using the ones provided by the OS. I used to use Firefox with Tree Style Tabs, but then I found out that having multiple windows full of tabs was good enough, and I can use the OS to just arrange the windows without needing to arrange the tabs therein.

I feel the same way. Like many people who would agree, I use a highly configurable tiling window manager. I have convenient hotkeys for switching and re-arranging windows. I don't want to have to switch into my browser, and then switch mental modes to a different set of controls for switching and re-arranging tabs.

I have not tried any tabless setups yet, though. For a browser I use iceweasel/firefox with pentadactyl, so I can hit `b` and switch tabs by number or search by tab title.

Isn't that what windows are, if you choose to use them?

Yes, but you can't choose to use them exclusively. Neither Chrome nor Firefox make it possible to disable tabbed browsing completely, or even to hide the tab bar. There's currently no extensions that do it either.

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