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Comment by kevsim | Hacker News Reader

I guess nothing stops us from running one tab per window but I have to say I'm not keen to go back to that. What we be the advantage there over tabs in your opinion?

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Window manager can

* group windows in virtual desktop

* search by title

* put side by side

* display fullscreen

* manage shortcuts

Some window managers can't. Browser work around with tabs. It's fine for most of the users, it's missing opportunity for some. At least I was not able to disable tabs completely.

Why WOULDN'T you want to be able to use tabs on all of your windows?

And why WOULDN'T you want to be able to move any tab to any edge (top, bottom, left, right) of any window?

And why WOULDN'T you want to be able to group and stack and tile tabbed windows from different applications together?

What I would like, is Emacs/Vim-style buffers. When you don't have one open, it's completely invisible. When you want to switch to it, you perform an incremental search for its title. No need to hunt for things on the screen. A lot faster and a lot more tidy wrt what's currently visible on the screen. No distractions.

If you're willing to go whole-hog, I've had good experiences using EXWM for this.

I’m not arguing for the multi-window alternative. Indeed in MacOS I quite like the tabbed interface for applications. It just amuses me how when the problem re-arose, we solved it differently than we had previously.

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