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Comment by ta8903 | Hacker News Reader

Not sure if I agree about using windows instead of tabs. I have hundreds of tabs open, and dozens loaded, at any moment. I'm sure that it's possible to manage all the context with separate windows via a window manager, but it would have to be a REALLY good window manager to be able to provide equivalent features of tree style tabs and separate panes and whatever else that something like Sidebery provides, and it is always easier for each application developer to implement tabs suitable for that application's requirements.

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I think one of the point of the author is making might also be that a window manager could do just more, like managing windows as tabs as well.

So that any application could have tabs, if the desktop manager would allow you to group windows as such. Same with showing a split view within such a tab as well.

I think I agree with that. I could imaging that the browser containers of tabs would make a ton of sense if I could make a container of windows handled as tabs across different applications at the window manager level.

Windows (IE) tried to give WM visibility into tabs long ago, but this quickly revealed a problem: if tabs are now also separate windows, they enter the Alt+Tab ring, and suddenly you're Alt+Tabbing between 5 applications and dozens of open tabs. N=1, as a tab hoader, I absolutely hated it (it also made Alt+Tab itself very slow to show and cycle).

The general problem is that having WM handle in-app tabs means the WM has to support every single hare-brained idea about meaning and role of tabs that app developers invent, which is infeasible. Even with browsers - until recently, you had like just two types of tabs: regular tabs, and porn-mode (er, "private browsing") tabs. Then came "account containers" or whatever it was in Firefox. Then came tab groups, reading groups, and tons of other nonsense.

OTOH, I can dream of an ideal world where the OS manages all tabs for all apps via combination of Sidebery (better "tree style tabs") and a tiling WM.

Edge tabs show up in alt + tab.

Yes. That's why I'm not using it. I was forced to, briefly, and first thing I did was to dig up a setting to disable this.

Ideally the manager would have windows and containers. Containers can be nested and can be floating windows, splits and tabs. There is no reason why tabs inside a window should belong to one application.

All that being said, navigation in such a structure would be a mess that would need a lot of learning. Also I’m sure a window manager like this already exists somewhere.

A system wide search within tabs would help more maybe.

Like chrome’s cmd+A but for all tabs everywhere

> So that any application could have tabs, if the desktop manager would allow you to group windows as such. Same with showing a split view within such a tab as well.

Not only that, but you could actually mix "tabs" from separate applications!

I use Sway and happily manage my terminal windows using its tabs and splits. I can mix other "graphical" apps with the terminals or move them to another screen, all with the same keybindings. I agree, though, that I wouldn't want to replace my Sidebery vertical tabs with this setup, but I ultimately don't see why equivalent functionality couldn't be implemented inside the window manager in some alternate universe.

There are sadly hardly any WMs now with tabs, so having them support tree style tabs as well doesn't look too realistic.

Do you really need hundreds of open tabs though? To me this suggests a workflow issue rather than a tab management problem.

I only keep tabs open that I'm actively working on right now (or am imminently about to switch back to). I regularly close tabs (and windows for that matter) that are only open because I forgot about them, or that I might use again but not until hours or days later. If I need them later I just open them again.

For me, having hundreds of things open at once just creates clutter that makes it harder to focus.

I don't know, it works for me.

Using Sidebery panes and treestyle tabs makes it really easy to organize your tabs, I have a tree with all my tasks with relevant documentation or subtasks under each task, and I have a separate panes with all the documentation I refer constantly at the top and everything I'm reading right now at the bottom. I definitely have a lot of tabs I opened to read and never closed, but that doesn't matter since everything is arranged in an approximation of a 2D space, I still know where to look for something specific. I'm sure you feel this is weird because you've never used a tree-style tab manager, but personally I can't go back to a regular browsing setup.

You've convinced me enough to give it a try.

I think I'd still maintain a conceptual difference between sites that are source material (e.g. documentation) or apps (e.g. Google Translate), and those that are just for browsing (e.g. news, blogs) and are more ephemeral (I may read it now, or keep it for later, but either way I'll be done with it).

You'd open a PDF, Word document, or app in its own window which you'd manage with your DE / WM. To me it feels like a bit of an anti-pattern to have some of this type of content handled by my WM, and others by a tree-style tab manager, when they are the same "type" of content. I want to be able to press the same keyboard shortcut to switch to my documentation whether it happens to be a PDF or a website.

On the other hand, there isn't anything else really equivalent to browsing-type content, so the tree-style tab manger feels more natural to me there.

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