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Comment by m463 | Hacker News Reader

I kind of wish there was a project-oriented complete desktop environment, where you could enter a project and everything was context-sensitive to it. editor, files, directories, shell, browser, whatever.

sort of a way to work on projects, then put them on old.

and maybe meta-projects to choose, track, arrange, manage some or all projects. maybe by area of responsibility.

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KDE Plasma had Activities that came close to this i think:

https://www.howtogeek.com/be-more-productive-in-linux-with-k...

Initially it seemed useful but it quickly felt like more of a chore. At work it's mostly just the same one IDE and one browser. For personal stuff I either used a different user account/different laptop and there was little benefit of activities for me after that.

looong time ago - ~2005 maybe? - the late Pieter Hintjens told me about such overarching idea including whole project management and all related ping-pongs - code, data, documents, issues, e-mails, chats, everything - think like one laptop for this project and different one for that project - and that they had at the time approached something like that, and got it mostly working, over linux etc. But AFAIK it never went public and has been abandoned.

So the field is ripe for whoever wants to try... though now same accounts to XYZ are being used for hundred things..

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Hintjens

Or switchable buffers, some could be dedicated to certain projects.

I'm not a fan of Docker, but Docker could do this.

If that's not enough, there's always whole VMs.

direnv can do a lot of that.

Nix is that taken to the logical conclusion.

nix and direnv might be worth a look.

my first thought too. on a mac at least it’s a little crusty, but it really does make it convenient to have a project completely and accurately describe its environment.

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