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Comment by anthony_romeo | Hacker News Reader

Real talk on tabs -- Tabs were always just a way for the browser to mitigate how horribly window managers handled multiple open windows at the time. IMO the OS/Distro/WM itself should be managing a global tab interface for all apps to use, rather than having app-makers needlessly reinvent the wheel over-and-over again.

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It'd be neat to have a "container window" within which you could put arbitrary applications in, and have a tab associated with each of them.

So you could group a bunch of open web pages, a word document and a file folder for some research on a particular topic. Or a game and a walkthrough together. Your repl, ide, and a web browser open on stackoverflow for some programming.

Instead of application-oriented navigation, you'd have group s of tasks that you'd navigate between. You'd probably ctrl-tab between tabs inside of a container more often than you'd alt-tab between tasks.

You can do this, at least with Windows or Linux, by grouping windows into separate desktops.

see:

tabbed (suckless.org)

XEmbed

Or Fluxbox

I agree that tabs initially addressed the problem of bad window managers. But nowadays I use Tree Style Tab which incorporates hierarchy and the context of related tabs in a way that I don't think an external window manager could handle anywhere near as well.

Interesting read: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/meet-th...

Tabs didn't appear in Netscape before 2002. I recall reading somewhere on the web that devs from Netscape didn't like the idea but don't quote me on that.

Stardock actually has software for Windows that does something like that:

https://www.stardock.com/products/groupy/

I agree with that. As soon as I switched to i3 on linux, I stopped using any tabs/windows splits in Terminator (my terminal emulator of choice at a time). I still use tmux on remote ssh, but locally i3 does much better deal than terminator/kitty/you name it

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