Comment by jacknews | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacknews | Hacker News Reader

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I've been fiddling with my environment the last few days. Looking at replacing nvim with helix, zsh with fish, ubuntu with debian, etc.

I agree to some extent, that there should be more structure or integration to workspaces.

tabs should be a part of the windowing system, for example, not something apps do themselves (and all differently). Then, the windowing system could support breaking out tabs to new windows, navigating between them, etc, in a manner consistent with the rest of the window system. The same with terminal multiplexers, etc. With text editors, some text actions could be defined universally, and mapped to keystrokes, so that in any editing environment, you have a consistent set of affordances. Why is the editor managing 'splits', when the terminal multiplexer, if not the window manager, should be doing this? You end up having to define (often conflicting) key mappings in multiple apps to get any kind of overall-usable/consistent setup.

Etc. I agree the current situation is a mess.

You can get a long way with neovim. I use it as my text editor, ide, and terminal multiplexer. Consistent tabs, panes, text editing, etc. If it supported a terminal graphics protocol it would be just about perfect.

Yes while you're in one 'garden' everything is rosy.

How do you switch to other apps, or between virtual worksapces though? All that's defined by the terminal emulator, or window system, outside of nvim, and hopefully it's consistent or at least doesn't conflict.

So I guess the OP argument is that everything should be in the 'window manager' garden, instead of all the apps making their own little alcoves with their own custom little languages.

The traditional emacs solution is to move everything into emacs, and they actually follow through (emacs can, in fact, be a window manager, web browser, and terminal emulator).

That's how I use emacs every day. Once it is open, I rarely need to do anything outside of it. Code, compile, debug, web search, etc. It can handle everything I have thrown at it.

lol, emacs can do everything. Shame my wrists aren't compatible with it's keyboard command architecture.

Have you tried using a prefix-based window manager? Now I have the same keys in window manager, multiplexer, and editor, just with different prefixes. It also nests well if you do remote or virtualized graphical sessions.

I wonder if anyone already made tabs for StumpWM..

On macOS the concept of tab is a part of the window management system. However a lot of apps decide to do it themselves anyway—and given the stage of the window manager of macOS I can’t really blame them.

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