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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

I could imagine you could have the best of both worlds:

  +-+-----+-------------------------+
  | |     |                         |
  | |     |                         |
  | |     |                         |
  |A|  B  |           C             |
  | |     |                         |
  | |     |                         |
  | |     |                         |
  +-+-----+-------------------------+

Where B is the previous level of the tree, C is the detailed table view of the current level, and A is a compressed representation of all the previous levels (you could e.g. click on it to replace B with B's parent, and C would get replaced with details of B).

Did anyone try something like this out?

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That seems a bit similar to the Ranger[1] given as an example in the article. There's also ranger.el[2] for Emacs. By default in ranger.el (and I assume Ranger too, but I haven't used it), B is the current level, A is the previous level and C is a preview of whatever you have selected in B. You can hide the preview (so the current level would be C) and add more previous levels. There's no compressed view of all previous levels though.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranger_(file_manager)

[2]: https://github.com/ralesi/ranger.el

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_tree has some of the same strengths as this idea. Perhaps it hasn't been pursued because it was under patent the whole time when desktop UIs were still evolving.

Another reason to hate software patents.

Not OP, but this is basically the same dream layout I've sketched for myself!

Unfortunately it would give me the most day-to-day benefit on OSX, which is probably the place I'm least likely to see it implemented...

IIRC, Spotify used to do something like this, at least in the desktop app?

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