Interesting and expansive post about what the modern desktop experience should be like, and most of it has nothing to do with Tmux except if you squint in some very particular way.
Yeah, I was expecting yet another post about going back to 1980's UNIX, CP/M, MS-DOS/Novell, MVS, VMS,... experience from people that didn't had to put up with the experience in first place.
Kind of weird that the author does not make clear what a "normal person" is, despite this being a central concept to their article.
Personally I don't think it is normal to be unable to double click on i3wm in some graphical apt wrapper and then pick it from a scroll list at login. People use shortcuts in Windows all the time. Having more than one workspace might have been foreign to most a decade or two ago, but these days external monitors are common and workspaces are basically that.
I've seen people who I would not consider abnormal go from weird misconceptions about i3wm to efficiently sending around windows between workspaces and screens in a day. If you want you can also click your way through it, and configuration is generated for you after you decide whether you want Alt or Super as the core command key. Defaults are rather sensible, so you don't have to fiddle with them until you've got some experience.
Historically user interfaces on web pages and in Windows and Mac OS:s has changed quite a bit and people who I think most would consider normal managed to adapt.
Vertical tabs is a feature in some modern browsers (all?), toggled in settings
Virtual desktops might help some people where you just ctrl+alt+left/right to move to them, instead of multiple monitors (where applicable). Or just fullscreen apps and I think it's like ctrl+tab to switch between a bunch of them
The only way to keep all the files on the filesystem is probably to avoid the silos
I guess we could ironically / unironically ask AI for some OS design tips for our setups haha
Persistence is something I care about, Tmux allow that between different sessions, local or otherwise, Windows Remote Desktop also makes it simple to continue work remotely. What bothers me is that the OS will eventually need to reboot, and the user is expected to reconfigure the sessions afterwards, at least partially.
I think a modern computer should be able to update its software, kernel included, in a way that the state of the userland could be kept, even with an actual reboot.
> The best two examples of this are the Arc browser and Chrome OS. But I think Arc is actually the more interesting of the two experiments. Their first innovation was to break the idea of tabs at the top and instead move it to be a sidebar model.
I will forever hate Arc for popularizing vertical tabs the way they did.
Vertical tabs were a thing since at least the Tree Style Tabs extension (2007), except the Tree Style Tabs were infinitely cooler, because they were a tree, not a list, and right click->open in new tab, would open the new tab as a child of the current tab.
So you could have a hacker news tab during your break, start opening a bunch of articles, read through them, simply un-expand the HN sub-tree, go to work, and then re-expand it during your next break.
Because of Arc, everyone is now implementing vertical tabs, but no one is implementing Tree Style Tabs, and, probably no one ever will again.
This talk about "the future" is nonsense. UI is art, not engineering. What some love, others will inevitably hate. This is where unix/linux is light-years ahead of the competition. Unlike Windows/OSX/iOS, you can make your own mixtape.
That, and Steve Jobs died a long-ass time ago. The hand-wringing over "config files" in the age of qwen3 you can run on a 10-year-old GPU is no longer as relevant as it once was. Language got us this far. The checkboxes and picklists of PARC were a detour that is now (thankfully) in our rear-view mirror. Config files are awesome.
emacs -> screen -> tmux -> tmux integrated into <terminal app>
appears to be the path.
I guess the fork was "emacs before X" to "emacs after X but we retrofiited some ideas from X into the terminal" -> <the rest is history>
Especially Zmacs and XEmacs, and how their features eventually found a way back into Emacs proper.
It is multiplexer so survives app kills, and interface is heavily keyboard driven.
I tried running email in it though resigned (and guess what, wrote my own) because HTML email support is must have nowadays.
Personally I don't think it is normal to be unable to double click on i3wm in some graphical apt wrapper and then pick it from a scroll list at login. People use shortcuts in Windows all the time. Having more than one workspace might have been foreign to most a decade or two ago, but these days external monitors are common and workspaces are basically that.
I've seen people who I would not consider abnormal go from weird misconceptions about i3wm to efficiently sending around windows between workspaces and screens in a day. If you want you can also click your way through it, and configuration is generated for you after you decide whether you want Alt or Super as the core command key. Defaults are rather sensible, so you don't have to fiddle with them until you've got some experience.
Historically user interfaces on web pages and in Windows and Mac OS:s has changed quite a bit and people who I think most would consider normal managed to adapt.
> I don't have a single fucking clue how MacOS populates this window
Nobody does, but it’s provocative! Gets the people going!
I’ve leaned into Aerospace for window management, herdr for terminal and good ol’ Chrome for browsing.
I put my hope to Superlogical by the Ghostty-guy to solve all my MUX problems
I honestly don't get why they ignore existing options due to configs. Give it a try, maybe it won't be _that_ bad.
Virtual desktops might help some people where you just ctrl+alt+left/right to move to them, instead of multiple monitors (where applicable). Or just fullscreen apps and I think it's like ctrl+tab to switch between a bunch of them
The only way to keep all the files on the filesystem is probably to avoid the silos
I guess we could ironically / unironically ask AI for some OS design tips for our setups haha
I think a modern computer should be able to update its software, kernel included, in a way that the state of the userland could be kept, even with an actual reboot.
I will forever hate Arc for popularizing vertical tabs the way they did.
Vertical tabs were a thing since at least the Tree Style Tabs extension (2007), except the Tree Style Tabs were infinitely cooler, because they were a tree, not a list, and right click->open in new tab, would open the new tab as a child of the current tab.
So you could have a hacker news tab during your break, start opening a bunch of articles, read through them, simply un-expand the HN sub-tree, go to work, and then re-expand it during your next break.
Because of Arc, everyone is now implementing vertical tabs, but no one is implementing Tree Style Tabs, and, probably no one ever will again.
I've been using Tmux and later Zellij for many years, while I was on Ubuntu's Unity, then Gnome, KDE, i3 and lastly sway.
Until I switched to niri (https://github.com/niri-wm/niri) ... since then I haven't used tmux at all.
Very weird, come to think of.
That, and Steve Jobs died a long-ass time ago. The hand-wringing over "config files" in the age of qwen3 you can run on a 10-year-old GPU is no longer as relevant as it once was. Language got us this far. The checkboxes and picklists of PARC were a detour that is now (thankfully) in our rear-view mirror. Config files are awesome.
t. i3 user