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Comment by BobbyTables2 | Hacker News Reader

Compared to the experience of something like “Gimp”, I prefer something contained to a single window.

Otherwise two or three such apps running at the same time becomes a game of “where’s my window”. I hate the idea of a toolbar being its own window to be managed.

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That is because you are used to shitty window managers / desktop that don't remember position, do not support pinning and tagging windows, etc.

That is the issue, apps have to deal with the lowest common denominator in term of desktop management but there is absolutely no good reason to build a window manager inside a website.I think that with tabs people have generally forgotten they can open multiple browser windows.

As a long time Gimp user, I remember dealing with the same thing but they did eventually fix that. It actually runs in a single window by default now.

Im not sure gimp being constrained to a single window would constitute a multi-document interface.

I mean, old photoshop versions (CS3?) also used multiple windows, so if I were to take a guess that’s where Gimp got it from.

"palette" windows were common in a lot of creative applications for a really long time. it seems like with larger screens and higher resolutions, that's a lot less common by default than it used to be.

They indeed feel way less of a pain than dealing with an app with complicated UI stuffed into a single window on a screen with half the size the app was designed for. Even with the site we're discussing here, once I cranked scaling to 200% it became noticeable harder to read than a regular webpage with some text on it would with the same scaling.

However, I believe there is a better way to approach this: put each significant piece of functionality into a separate window or even executable, and use regular moveable toolbars and well-known hotkeys inside each window. One window for code editor (with working Ctrl+Tab and Window -> Tile Horizontally menu), another for configuration, yet another for terminal and output window (with a Pin on top button). When I write code I don't normally need configuration tool, but if I need it even so often it gets opened alongside the editor and is now one Alt+Tab away, not taking any screen space at all.

I used an engineering tool suite written with this approach and it was much better experience than the single-window monstrosity that came as a replacement, stuffing entirety of functionality into a single app and breaking (not implementing) a lot of small conveniences like aforementioned Ctrl+Tab.

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