Comment by KaiserPro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by KaiserPro | Hacker News Reader

I'm very keen for this market to open up, but we need to talk about the quality of the desktop before moving on.

On the website, the demo has the person drinking coffee, the youtube window is the wrong ratio, the text is too tall. For me, I really want picture perfect rendering before jumping. I don't want to look at badly rendered stuff, its part of the reason linux was so hard back in the day, getting your text to render and screen resolution to work right.

Now, for me, it looks like I can fit about as many terminals on "screen" as I can on two 1280x1024 screens. In all the demos, there are at most 5 windows open. On my current screen I have one browser, and 8 terminals, and there is still loads more space.

The thing that makes me a little sad is that we still all appear to be stuck at rendering everything on the inside of a sphere. If we are in VR, then we don't have to limit our selves to laying out windows on a single primitive. Where are the virtual shelves? where is the quick change, what about hotspots to bring groups of windows back into near field.

We have unlimited z depth, surely this is time to start using it? unlike a normal screen, we have parallax and gaze sensors, we really need to start using them.

(it looks like they don't have room tracking, so feels like they have limited 6dof source: coffee video, I'd expect much more sideways translation if they had proper headset tracking)

I think they'll get there. This is still early, they're probably focusing on the core rendering right now.

> If we are in VR, then we don't have to limit our selves to laying out windows on a single primitive. Where are the virtual shelves? where is the quick change, what about hotspots to bring groups of windows back into near field.

From playing VR games, actually the best implementation of this I've seen is to put them on a "belt" of sorts. Like an oversized toolbelt (so they're away from your body) so you can simply look down and grab stuff.

Spheres do work well, though. It keeps all the text at the same distance from you, so the edges aren't out of focus. I suspect it also makes zooming easier since you can just move the camera closer. If you have an actual 3D space, moving the camera can get weird, and the camera being weird in VR is really disorienting.

> (it looks like they don't have room tracking, so feels like they have limited 6dof source: coffee video, I'd expect much more sideways translation if they had proper headset tracking)

Not having room tracking doesn't prevent movement. You'd just move with wasd like before. Not having room tracking means you can move your chair 6 inches without all your windows getting shifted. Likewise, you can stand up in your standing desk without re-adjusting all the windows.

Plus I'm sure it'll help keep the cost down.

What do you do with 8 terminal open at the same time? I can never focus on more than one or two at a time.

"Microservices, son!"

Same. I also stopped using two monitors because it was distracting.

Maintain context. I might have several terminals up, each ssh'd to a different server. At least one terminal per software project. It helps that I use a tiling manager, so I can keep them all visible at the same time.

In Emacs I have tens of eshells open, not to mention SSH sessions, etc! I use one shell per task and then context switch using Emacs buffer switching machinery.

I'm debugging a embedded system, and have three different minicom sessions going on, looking at the simultaneous output of the various consoles.

In general, I often have up to 10 tabs open on Gnome terminal, and a GNU screen session in each with up to 10 screens. Maintaining lots of context.

Within a single GNU screen session, I'll often have a build window, some editing windows for code, editing windows for config files, etc.

good question!

depending on the project, it'll normally be browser for reference (or if its web based testing as well, but thats rare)

then I have about between 1/2 and 2/3rds of the screen space left to have terminals in.

I'll have one/two long terminals open with vim for the main file(s) I'm working on, then 1-4 smaller terminals for running the program/tests. if its a big project, then more terminals for reference (ie library one, library two etc.).

Think of it more as having a really big desk, with loads of copies of the same reference book open to different pages. Its quicker to glance than it is to alt-tab. For me (and i'm not claiming this is a universal trait) that flash of screens where we switch context from one full screen to the other makes me loose context on what I'm working on.

I have virtual monitors as well, all split into contexts, so one will have email/slack/$messenger one will have "personal" internets (ie timewasting sites) and a professional browser, thats logged into company services. If I'm doing graphics, then drawing/editing screens as well.

I used to be a proponent of many monitors. I bought a matrox parhelia new to support triple monitors when they came out. (yes I am that old). However due to the way my mind works, I found that with three screens I would end up in a spinlock with two browsers open, one in each monitor, and not do any work.

My eyesight is bad, and I use a 15" laptop with about 300 views open at a time. I feel no need for a bigger screen.

I keep one window on screen at any time, full screen. I use 2 sets of 16 virtual desktops, tmix, emacs and brave. Maybe 10 instances of each app, and of within each maybe ten tabs. So that's a total of about 300 windows. It gives me zero visibility problems. I much prefer using my hands to change whatn I'm looking at instead of my neck.

Surely vim can manage its own display and you don't need multiple terminals each running their own instance?

Vim can, but why in the world would I have vim do that itself when that means I have to learn/use both vims windowing system and my window managers windowing system? What advantage does it give me...

I spend more time interacting with Emacs than I do my window system, so I am quite happy arranging terminals, database clients, REPLs and code inside that, and there are huge advantages to all those being able to communicate frictionlessly. It'd be very annoying having to constantly multitask.

I feel like emacs makes a much better case for this than vim, because it actually takes advantage of everything being one program (at the expense of rewriting the world, and basically being it's own operating system).

It can, and sometimes its quite useful. If I have long terminals, I can :split, which is a nice option to have.

However a lot of the time the Vims are there for reference.

I would love to see VR/AR work cross paths with the concept of the "Memory Palace". Maybe groups of folders, websites, screens etc could be set up to be in different rooms of your house. Home automations could be configured to be in sync with your movement around the house.

Every time I stand up and walk to a different room the screens move to the periphery, and return when I sit. When a loud sound is heard, a notification identifies the sound and asks if you want to replay it. Etc.

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