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Comment by gedy | Hacker News Reader

One cool feature that I didn’t see described very well here is Cosmic allows you to group windows in tabs, but the tabs can be different applications. Kind of an interesting idea that the OS/window manager is what should be responsible for tab support, not each application.

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I like the idea but I also get reminded of the way the edge browser turns each tab into its own unit in the alt-tab switcher. That feels quite annoying.

There are a number of UX conventions, like tabs and tiles that often get replicated across both OS level and across different apps and they get slightly different key combos and interaction details.

It would be interesting if those conventions could be moved to the window manager layer instead. But then there are probably a bunch of interesting edge cases that needs solutions. Like should the file tree navigator of the ide exist in a separate WM-tile than the editor tiles? And if the file navigation spawns an editor, where should it appear? Etc...

Stacking is fantastic feature but it's not unique to Cosmic as the current DE for Pop_OS already has this feature.

Also available on Windows with FancyWM, which has been growing on me.

Originally from BeOS, I believe. (Thus the funky BeOS window shape. Still quite difficult to discover.)

You could drag the short title bar with a modifier key to move it from the leftmost position, and non-overlapping title bars would snap together to form tabs.

Several Linux WMs and DEs had this feature a long time ago, when screen space was kind of at a premium. Fluxbox had it for as long as I can remember it. KDE used to have it at some point in its 3.x or 4.x-series releases, I don't recall which one.

I would love to see this in xfwm4

Also available for KWin since a very long time (at least a decade).

I've been running PopOS, but don't see it - the Super+S stack shortcuts don't seem to be available unless I'm missing something.

I think it doesn't work unless you're in the tiling mode. You can also drag one one window into another window.

"Kind of an interesting idea that the OS/window manager is what should be responsible for tab support, not each application."

I agree completely, and even popup menus, sidebars and other sections of apps could/should be handled above/outside the app, for consistency, flexibility, etc.

This reminds me of a discussion on Twitter about this. Macintosh System 7 that had an app called Stapler, early Mac OS X had one called LaunchList both contained aliases to apps and documents. So I see the benefit of the OS managing this grouping.

So, over the last day or so I've built a modern macOS version of the app Stapler! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41212193

Any Linux app like this?

i3 , the tiling window manager, has had this for many years.

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