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Comment by idle_zealot | Hacker News Reader

Window management has been stagnant so long. I have mixed feelings about the Paper paradigm, but it's heartening to see some work in the space experimenting with the bedrock UX for operating systems, and hope we can eventually move past the floating windows approach on desktop and clumsy swipe-between-apps approach on mobile.

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Agreed. All I want is to manage OS windows the same way I manage Vim windows where the content and the container are decoupled. Surprised nobody has made this yet.

Not that you likely want to hear this as a Vim user, but I believe this is how EXWM works. Windows are displayed inside Emacs buffers, which are pretty decoupled from the windows they happen to be in.

(But heck, with evil-mode maybe it'd feel pretty familiar?)

I tried exwm a couple times and the thing that got me everytime was that it was... ok... as a window manager... but actually made working with emacs as a text editor really uncomfortable. I'm talking keybindings overlap (or not), and buffer management generally. It got really confusing. (That and the single-threaded behaviour of emacs generally, freezing up etc)

No worries - I drove Doom for ~6 months and got fed up with the lag, and with Lisp. I have a wrapper for Yabai that places new windows into a predetermined number of containers and allows me to move them quickly. It works ok.

I think Hyperland or i3/Sway could also be scripted to behave this way.

I think Emacs works the same with frame/buffers. What I really like in Emacs is not having "tabs" or anything like that. I can always open any file on the filesystem, why do I care what it is open currently? Only at the moment I want to switch do I want to see a list, but I don't want to select it like some neanderthal, I want to narrow it down by typing.

I wonder how well this would work for a WM, though. Processes are a lot heavier than buffers so it kind of does matter how many are running. Unless it's a system like Android where any app expects to be oom killed at any time.

One thing I do want to mention as a vim limitation, even with neovim & it's headless+client modes, there is still only a single screen. I'd love a neovim where I can have multiple separate clients connected to the same session, but each as a separate viewpoint (but shared list of buffers, shared registers, shared so much).

Doesnt seem super applicable to window managers at the moment, but there being a singular screen does seem like a severe UI limitation.

I do miss emacs frames.

Ratpoison does this if I'm understanding correctly.

musca is an X window manager that does something like this, where the tiling layout and windows are decoupled. github.com/enticeing/musca

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