Will Tabbed Windows Be the Next Big Thing?

kai_hiwatari writes "The recently released KDE SC 4.4 Beta 1 has introduced tabbed windows as a new feature. It is now possible to tab together windows from different applications. This looks like it will be a very good productivity tool. Like the tabbed browsers, this may well end up as a feature in all desktop environments in the years ahead."

Comments

So what?

[drijen]

Why is this a big deal?
Fluxbox (and probably something else before *box) had tab grouping windows long time ago.

Re:So what?

[ultrabot]

Why is this a big deal?

Fluxbox (and probably something else before *box) had tab grouping windows long time ago.

It's a big deal because a mainstream WM is finally adding it; and people don't need to lose all the KDE goodness just to get this feature.

Re:So what?

[mikael_j]

To my knowledge PWM had tabs before both Fluxbox and Ion (although I've heard scores of Fluxbox users who have claimed that Fluxbox was the first WM with tabs even though Fluxbox didn't even exist until some time after PWM was released (the other popular lightweight WM at the time was Blackbox and Fluxbox was, to many PWM users, basically just Blackbox with PWM's tabs)).

/Mikael

Re:So what?

[clang_jangle]

The tiling window manager Ion also had tabs since ages

Yes, I used ion3 for years before recently switching to xmonad. There's also dwm, awesome, scrotwm, and several others. A tiling wm is a no-brainer for anyone who wants to maximize productivity and screen real estate. I'm kind of surprised they're not de rigeur for coders and IT people in general. All the auto-everything features in KDE and Gnome are easy enough to script for anyone who wants them, without the DE bloat/sluggishness. Then again, some guy named Linus Torvalds uses a full-bloat DE so I guess one doesn't have to be a n00b to prefer them.

Re:So what?

[Jeremy Erwin]

Judging by the screenshot, Ion appeals to a specific type of eccentric.

Re:So what?

[Vyse of Arcadia]

Yeah, but you don't have to use KWin to use the rest of KDE. Once upon a time I used Windowmaker as a WM and KDE as a DE and it was pretty nice. I lost very little KDE goodness.

Re:So what?

[bnjf]

http://www.modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/pwm.html

Re:So what?

[honkycat]

Yeah, but try explaining that to a non-technical user. Good luck getting past the definition of a window manager.... getting it into the default install is a crucial step to making it "real" in the sense that non-gurus actually use it.

Re:So what?

[Cederic]

Back when I was mudding a lot, a WM that would auto-arrange three muds (in xterms), two to three command lines (in xterms) and Angband (in an xterm) would've been ideal.

These days I wouldn't want to tile though - especially if I'm programming.

The code needs as much screen space as possible. To the extent that frankly everything else can be hidden. If I'm using an IDE, then it has panes with useful information/abilities in them, that aid the programming, so they can stay, but they're still tiny relative to the code. That said, on something like my laptop, I don't need the code window to be 1920 pixels wide, so I can put other windows to the side. I do still want it 1200 pixels tall though (less the usual fluff of window borders, menu bars, scroll bars, etc - but I don't let those take up much screen real estate either).

Command lines, web browser, email clients.. all hidden in the background or on another monitor.

For non-programming uses, word processors work best for me at around half screen width. Web browsers do too - full screen and I'm looking left to right too often; I use a large screen fairly close, I have to explicitly look at different regions of the screen. However, something like Visio needs to be full screen - you can't draw diagrams in a small window.

So I still don't want to tile, I want different applications to have different window sizes.

Would tabbed applications work? On a netbook, where the small screen size effectively forces everything full-screen, probably. On a 1920x1200 screen, possibly. I could have my usual text editor and my word processor in one window, tabbed, my main and secondary command lines in another window, tabbed, my spreadsheets/drawing tools/presentation tools in another window (full screen), tabbed. I guess I'm saying I'd have to be able to group windows together by both the position and width on screen that I tend to use them.

Instinctively I'm against the idea, but I was also against tabbed web browsing until I tried it and now I'm completely hooked..

Re:So what?

[HateBreeder]

Forget about the non-gurus...
even gurus don't have the will to tinker about their settings for days on end just to get something trivial working.

We want to it to work already so that we could get around to doing our OWN work.

Yes

[Ark42]

Really, what's the point of having windows not Maximized. As far as I can tell, you'd be better off with the taskbar in windows being like tabs, and being able to drag tabs together to form split pane views for side-by-side work. I hate having to manually drag the edges of windows, and I hate when they are not fullscreen (or minimized). Yes I know about "Tile Windows Horizontally" but it just makes extra fluff for the borders of each window compared to a tabbed/paned view. Pretty much a big failure on OS X that their Maximize doesn't even always make a window full screen.

Re:Yes

[ZERO1ZERO]

The point of the windows is that you can drag stuff between them, you can't do this efficiently if they are maximised. And view two or more thing at once together. Manually dragging the edges of windows can suck, but in 'traditional' setups, you use the lower right corner (which is a big target) to adjust the size and the title bar (which is a big target) to adjust the position. Most Linux WMs also have ALT shortcut which makes large percentages of the windows 'hot' for adjustment.

Taking it a step further, (or back depending on POV) the original Mac WIMP implementation has a metphor of 'the desktop' and each window represents a _document_ or a physical _thing_. Desks are generally large enough to handle more than one bit of paper for example, and usually once document doesn't take up the whole desk.

Re:Yes

[Shin-LaC]

You might as well ask what's the point of having windows. The concept never really caught on in Windows, in spite of its name, but it's very useful to be able to have many things on screen at once, especially when none of them requires a full screen anyway.

Take this web page: if you have a large widescreen monitor and you maximize the browser, you get a silly layout, with very long text lines that make reading harder. Many websites work around this problem by using a fixed width layout, but then you just end up with two large empty areas on the sides of the actual webpages; or, worse yet, they may be filled with animated advertisements. A better solution is to make the browser window only as wide as it needs to be, so you can use the leftover space to keep an eye on other things, such as your email or an IM conversation. If you have a large monitor, you can even open two web pages side by side.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Furthermore, you can click a taskbar button, ctrl-right-click another taskbar button and select for example the menuitem that displays the windows side-by-side. Very handy, if you want to compare two documents, or if you want to display SDK info on the left and your code on the right, and so on. You can show multiple code windows on screen. Or a graph and a database table. Or dragging files from A to B. Or keeping half-an-eye on something while doing something else. GP would start to miss non-maximised windows pretty quickly, I'd wager.
Back on topic, I switched to Chrome (actually, to a clone, but whatever) a while ago and even though it is in many ways the best browser I've ever had, I wish I could turn off the tabs. Almost nothing works right. I see why it is practical to have buttons for other browser windows on the largely unused titlebar of a maximised window, okay. But the browser windows don't appear on the taskbar, nor in the alt-tab order. On the whole, it was a lot more user friendly when I didn't have tabs. Of course, Chrome's good points make me stay, but I still wish I could turn off tabs. Which means that at least for me, the KDE functionality wouldn't be particularly useful. And, judging by the screenshot, it shares at least one flaw with Chrome: you can't use the "deep" top-right corner to close just one window, without closing all of the windows in a tab-group. A feature which may not be useful to everyone shouldn't get in the way when you don't use it.
B.t.w., site is unreachable, coral cache still works: http://digitizor.com.nyud.net/2009/12/07/is-tabbed-windows-going-to-be-the-next-big-thing/

Re:Yes

[DreadPiratePizz]

If you option click the green button on the window in OS X, it will make it fullscreen, much like your maximize feature in Windows.

Re:Yes

[MathiasRav]

Manually dragging the edges of windows can suck, but in 'traditional' setups, you use the lower right corner (which is a big target) to adjust the size and the title bar (which is a big target) to adjust the position. Most Linux WMs also have ALT shortcut which makes large percentages of the windows 'hot' for adjustment.

In my experience, corners and title bars are still generally small enough that hunting and pecking is required - I can never casually slide my cursor to the target and immediately begin resizing/moving - that only happens with alt+left mouse button (drag) or alt+middle mouse button (resize).

It's a shame Windows doesn't have this kind of functionality built-in. I don't know about Mac, but since my switch from Windows XP to Ubuntu, alt+clicking to move/resize, along with workspaces and Compiz' Grid plugin to move and resize windows to fit an imagined grid, has been the main efficiency booster for me.

I'm not saying every ordinary user should have this kind of configuring work forced on them, it's just a really good reason for *me* to make the switch.

(And of course, a proper command line and an OS with an extensive "built-in" software catalog (Debian's/Ubuntu's apt repositories) that's free and that doesn't suck have also been compelling reasons.)

Re:Yes

[Zhiroc]

Something I've always liked about the "old" X windows model that I dislike about Windows (and I think Mac as well), is the assumption that the application with the focus should be the one that is in front of all others. There are a lot of times when I'd like to type into one app, say a text editor, while viewing something else, like a browser loaded with a documentation page, where I want to see the whole browser while I type, even if that means just seeing a few lines of what I'm typing.

I know that GNOME allows a focus-follows-mouse mode, but it is partly incomplete as clicking in the window with the focus brings that window to the front. If anyone knows how to disable that, I'd appreciate it.

Re:Yes

[MathiasRav]

Compiz has a 'raise on click' config option which can be disabled. I'm not sure of the internal representation, but it is in General Options of ccsm. Be sure to set a keyboard shortcut to 'Raise window' - though if you don't, alt-tab or clicking the window list will do.

I'm not sure if a similar option is available in Metacity or whatever else you happen to be using, although it would seem likely.

If you do look into compiz or are using it, you might want to also look at disabling click to focus (making way for the focus-follows-mouse mode you mentioned) and the Opacify plugin (under Accessibility*), which will make windows in front of the window you're hovering over partly transparent. I use this to great effect.

* ...As if not being able to see through windows is a disability.

Re:Yes

[BlindSpot]

Back in the old (3.x) days of Windows it was much more common to have actual windows. Then MDI came along and limited you to moving docs within the space of the parent window, so the only thing was to maximize the Window if you wanted to compare docs. Then toolbar and menu bloat came along so if your window wasn't maximized you couldn't see half the commands. So now I think it's probably more habit than anything else.

Also I disagree with you. I find Slashdot and most other pages (as well as any app with lots of text like a word processor or IDE) much easier to read in a full window. More text on screen means it's easier to visually scan back to something if needed. Plus the problem with sizing your web browser is every page is designed for a different size. Even if a page is well-designed and doesn't assume a fixed width, there is still a certain width that each page needs to be to be reasonably readable, and that varies. Constantly resizing and repositioning a window is infuriating. True when it's maximized there is wasted space but at least the page will be readable.

Besides, damnit, I paid for dual wide-screen monitors and I'm not afraid to use them!

Re:Yes

[Shin-LaC]

Typographers know that overlong lines make reading harder from over five centuries of experience printing books. User interface specialists confirm it. If you like 400-character lines, maybe you're special, or maybe you simply don't know any better.
I mean no offense, but your other remark suggests the latter: I have been browsing with a non-maximized window for years, and I can assure you that there is no "constant resizing and repositioning". You can just keep your windows at slightly over 1000 pixels wide, and it works fine for all websites.
When you do decide to adjust things a bit (perhaps to make more room for keeping another another window visible), dragging the corner of the window (I use a Mac) is no more work than clicking on a tab or on a button in the taskbar, actions you do thousands of times a day without complaining. You're just adding maybe five clicks a day to those thousands.

OTOH, you make some good points about the history of Windows.

Re:Yes

[Blakey Rat]

Pretty much a big failure on OS X that their Maximize doesn't even always make a window full screen.

OS X doesn't have Maximize. It has Zoom. It's only had Zoom since version 1.0 in 1984.

Apple's never implemented Maximize, and they've never pretended, even for a second, that Zoom is the same thing as Maximize. So the failure is you, I'm afraid.

Re:Yes

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

You need to get a bigger screen.

The above comment was posted in demonstration of the Prime Rule of Requirements Deflection: tell the user that they want something other than what they ask for.

Re:Yes

[moosesocks]

Same reason why newspapers and magazines print in columns. Unfortunately, proper columns still aren't a part of the CSS specification, meaning that it'll be several years before we see them in the wild on the web.

A draft specification has languished within the w3c for 8 or so years. Firefox and webkit both offer their own proprietary implementations that should be vaguely compatible with the draft specification.

IE doesn't offer support for anything of this sort. (In fact, Microsoft's own documentation offers a surprisingly handy reference to the many bits of CSS that IE chooses to ignore)

This is just the dumbest thing I have ever heard.

[RocketRabbit]

Tabbed browsing makes sense. You have one application, a web browser, with multiple pages, taking up less screen space. It's tabbed so you don't have to click on a bunch of minimized windows or use Expose or whatever shiny workalike the Gnome / KDE bunch has now to find what you want, and so you aren't cluttering up the desktop with a hundred web browser windows.

However, there is something to be said for separating out the different applications and simply clicking the icon or what have you, to switch between them. In fact, isn't that what Windows has had for about 15 years now? Sure, the application tab bar goes on the bottom the screen by default, and is called the "Start Menu" but it is essentially, exactly what is proposed here.

The problem is that you end up filling up the bar, and then having to collapse the bar in one of several ways, all of which are annoying.

Expose, or whatever the Gnome / KDE equivalent is, is so much handier.

Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that doesn't matter!

Chrome OS anyone?

[Pharmboy]

Isn't that pretty much a given feature of Chrome OS?

Re:Simply put

[biryokumaru]

Dude, yes! We could put all our applications there as we're using them, possibly even group like ones together!

Only it wouldn't be tabs anymore, it'd be tasks, so we could call it... not the tab bar... I know! Let's call it the "Taskbar!"

Oh, wait...

Um, this is very last year.

[pyster]

Idk man, I've been using wintabber for well over a year. It's great for poorly written apps that want to open hundreds of windows. (ATT's OOS ticketing system for example). Tabbing has some nice advantages.

Not sure

[WiiVault]

I was under the impression that in OS X maximize sized the window to the content. For instance if the thing is small it will not expand the window and fill it up with whitespace. Seems a bit smarter to me than having an overly large window. Of course if the content spans past the dimensions of the monitor then it will go full screen to try and fit as much possible in.

Re:Not sure

[Firehed]

Indeed - and for this reason, it's a "zoom" button rather than "maximize" (which is just being pedantic, but I figured it's worth pointing out). Anyways, when I first switched over to the Mac platform that drove me insane. After a couple of weeks I got used to the change, and after a couple more weeks found it far more useful than having a single window fill the screen. Since windows aren't taking more space than they need, it allows me to either have more windows visible (on a large monitor, anyways) or have at least some of the other apps I'm working with partly exposed so I can click to them more easily.

Of course, there are some situations where I want maximized windows for distraction-free work, but that's pretty limited in nature (reading or writing, in the English not code sense) and many of the apps that are very text-heavy have the zoom button do a typical maximize for that precise reason.

And still, if it bothers you that tremendously, you can always drag the window to the full screen size.

Re:Not sure

[IntlHarvester]

Only problem with your theory is that none of that worked on the original Macintosh. It was a single tasking OS, and the desktop was inaccessible while running an app. And "clippings" didn't appear until System 7.something.

The original intent was probably to enable window switching within an application.

Also I've noticed that a lot of Mac blowhards on this site love to frame these things in terms of the "original Mac" or "since 1984", when it is clear they probably have never used anything under MacOS 8.

Re:Not sure

[commodoresloat]

That's exactly my understanding of the way this should work, and OS X generally does it quite well IMHO. It does fail pretty bad in some applications though, notably MS Office apps. But the GP view is 180 degrees from my ideal user experience; the way Windows handles maximization of windows is one of the bigger reasons I have always preferred MacOS. I *like* being able to see other windows behind where I am when I'm working in multiple programs (which is almost always). I can't stand opening up a 2 paragraph document and having it take over the entire screen. And, frankly, I don't think tabbing the entire user experience will improve this at all.

Remember, MacOS X did exactly the right thing with tabbed browsing. It was a concept *explicitly* ruled out in their human interface guidelines, but after they saw what was happening with Mozilla, they made a decision to chuck the HIGs for Safari and create the most lickable tabbed browsing experience they could. The guidelines adapted without being swept completely in another direction -- tabbed browsing is available when it makes good sense for it to be available, but it doesn't dominate the user experience. Hopefully OS X will show similar restraint if tabbed windows do in fact "become the next big thing."

Re:Window tabs are already here

[bmo]

That's what Windows users always said about Opera and Mozilla tabs.

The Microsoft put tabs in IE7 and 8.

WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW?

--
BMO

Re:Simply put

[Interoperable]

It's an option. You can choose not to use it. It could be handy in some situations or appeal to particular users in which case you can use it. As long as it's stable and doesn't consume resources unduly, why wouldn't you want the option?

Re:This is just the dumbest thing I have ever hear

[Colonel Korn]

Tabbed browsing makes sense. You have one application, a web browser, with multiple pages, taking up less screen space. It's tabbed so you don't have to click on a bunch of minimized windows or use Expose or whatever shiny workalike the Gnome / KDE bunch has now to find what you want, and so you aren't cluttering up the desktop with a hundred web browser windows.

However, there is something to be said for separating out the different applications and simply clicking the icon or what have you, to switch between them. In fact, isn't that what Windows has had for about 15 years now? Sure, the application tab bar goes on the bottom the screen by default, and is called the "Start Menu" but it is essentially, exactly what is proposed here.

The problem is that you end up filling up the bar, and then having to collapse the bar in one of several ways, all of which are annoying.

Expose, or whatever the Gnome / KDE equivalent is, is so much handier.

Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that doesn't matter!

Switcher is a Windows version of Expose which offers great customization. If you want to combine the best of OSX and Windows, you absolutely need Switcher. I find myself using the taskbar 2/3 of the time, but there are definitely times when the wonderful Expose-like behavior is the most efficient way to switch between windows. Map it to a 4th or 5th mouse button.

Correct level

[bvankuik]

Giving up modpoints for this: this is an awesome feature. Basically this will do what the Google Chrome browser does, except now at the correct level.Like managing window size and position, it seems to me the tabbing of windows should be done at the Window Manager level. Currently, each app tries to solve this separately. That is a waste of resources.

Oh, FFS ...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

When I clicked on this story, I knew there would countless comments saying, "We've already got this, it's called the taskbar" or words to that effect.

It's not the same thing. With windows containing tabs for multiple applications and/or documents, you don't have one taskbar; you have as many "taskbars" as you have windows open. This isn't necessarily something you'd want to do all the time, but I can certainly see how it would be useful in some situations. If I'm working on multiple code files, and for each of those files I have two or three browser windows open containing references for the specific file (a common enough occurrence in my field, which is bioinformatics; it's considered good form to put references to the appropriate journal articles in the code comments) then it would be very nice to be able to group the code and the browser windows in this way -- i.e., instead of a few code tabs in one window and a bunch of reference tabs in another window, for each chunk of code there would be associated references. If I could save those multi-tabbed windows and open them back up the same way the next time I got back to work on the project, so much the better.

Re:Oh, FFS ...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

No, that's not what I'm talking about. (Since I'm on OS X, I don't know about kpager, so take this FWIW.) What I have right now is

Window 1: BBEdit tab 1, tab 2, tab 3
Window 2: Seamonkey tab 1, tab 2, ...
Window 3: Safari tab 1, tab 2 ...

What I'd like to have, or at least be able to have, is:

Window 1: BBEdit file 1, associated Seamonkey tab(s), associated Safari tab(s)
Window 2: BBEdit file 2, associated Seamonkey tab(s), associated Safari tab(s)
Window 3: BBEdit file 3, associated Seamonkey tab(s), associated Safari tab(s)

Note that I'm not saying I'd work this way all the time; most of the time, I'd probably keep tabs grouped with their own apps. But having the option to move tabs around from window to window, without regard to application, would be really useful sometimes.

There are lots of tabbed WMs out there

[Rufus211]

I've been using the Ion window manager for years. The principle behind it is keyboard-controlled tabbed and tiled windows. There's an entire wiki list of similar tiling window managers, which are all also tabbed window managers. Ion will also let you create non-tilled windows that are still tabbed, so exactly what KDE is now doing.

WMs that can do this have been around forever, but it's nice that they're finally going more "mainstream". I'm still never going to use KDE or Gnome (way to heavyweight), but it's nice that they might be a more reasonable option in the future.

Re:Simply put

[Daniel Dvorkin]

As long as it's stable and doesn't consume resources unduly, why wouldn't you want the option?

Because to a lot of people on /. (and everywhere else, to be sure) the way they do things is the One True Way, and anyone who disagrees with their way of doing things is clearly evil, insane, or a moron (possibly all three.) "My workflow is Good And Right; yours is Inferior And Must Be Destroyed. Users must not even have the option to follow your unclean way, lest they be tempted from the path of righteousness!" That kind of thing.

Tab bars versus taskbars? WTF?

[macraig]

It's rather disappointing that even now there are still people who think that "bars" crammed full of "tabs" with truncated text are somehow a game-changing paradigm shift compared to "bars" crammed full of "buttons" with truncated text.

More of the same, please!

Re:Simply put

[Shin-LaC]

The point is that we want to group windows by task, not by application. Let's say I'm working on a web application, so I have a window showing the contents of the project folder, a text editor, and a browser to test the application. At the same time (where "same time" doesn't mean that I do two things at once, but that I share my time between several activities over a range of many days), I'm writing a C program, so I have another editor window (or maybe an IDE), another project folder, a terminal with man pages, more browser windows for documentation, and so on.

The Windows taskbar, in spite of its name, doesn't understand human tasks at all: instead, it would group all browsers together, all editors together, all terminals together, and so on. This is stupid and useless. With tabbed heterogeneous windows, instead, I would be able to group webpage-related windows together, and C-related windows together. It sounds like a very useful feature to me.

Re:Simply put

[crispytwo]

I use 'spaces' on the mac or multiple desktops on linux (windows has nothing useful) for the same thing now. Why would tabs be any different?

Windows 1.0

[Kayamon]

Isn't this basically Windows 1.0? All applications tiled onto fullscreen?

What goes around comes around...

Re:Simply put

[RicktheBrick]

Yes1 I can just see it now. Porn staring Jo, Porn staring Ella, Porn with both Jo and Ella. It would greatly help my effeceintcy in watching porn.

Not a new feature but new in a big DE, I think

[Lemming Mark]

Don't think GNOME has done this, don't know about XFCE. Compiz can do it, plus at least some basic tiling I think. And obviously not on Win or Mac. So KDE it the most "mainstream" desktop to have tabbed windows so far. But it's far from a new invention. There has also been talk of tiling support for KWin, the KDE window manager, which would make it even more useful. Various window managers using tabbing / tiling exist, such as ion, dwm, wmii, Xmonad, etc. They're nice but I missed the integration of having a full DE (though you can get it if you try). Partiwm is a project to create a more DE-friendly tabbing window manager but AFAICS it's gone a bit off track since its creator invented xpra and concentrated on that instead...

Friends of mine have observed that tabbing in the WM makes a lot of sense. Tab together a load of single browser instances and you have a multi-process web browser. OK, so it's not quite Chrome in security features but it's a heck of a lot simpler. Tab a load of terminals together and get a slick multi-terminal app. Tab OpenOffice together with your web browser whilst you're writing a report and researching stuff online. Tab together emacs + console running LaTeX + PDF viewer and get an integrated development environment for scientific papers. Nice.

I'm exaggerating the simplicity slightly but the point is that things are far more flexible if commonly-needed features (how many apps use tabs these days) are provided by the platform where possible.

Re:Simply put

[feder]

Yeah, but how does that make me look all cool and skeptical about everything that has the word 'tabs' in it? To hell with "very useful" - it's not street, bro', that's what I'm saying!

Re:Simply put

[KrimZon]

Yeah, plus spaces/workspaces offer the added benefit of being able to see multiple task-relevant windows at once. For example one to read from and the other to type into, or having multiple information displays at once.

What workspaces need though is the ability to create workspaces when you need them and destroy them when they're unneeded as opposed to having a fixed number of them, and possibly more refined or enhanced ways of identifying those spaces at a glance (without any further input needed).

Wrong

[CrashNBrn]

Windows has had multiple desktops since Win98 (or before).

Google: Virtual Desktop

VirtuaWin - Virtual Desktops for Windows
VirtualWin provides virtual desktops for the Windows operating system much in the same way Linux/Unix does.

I've also seen Beta-software: Deskloops v2.0.1.0 (2007) - which tended to be somewhat buggy, but let you create Windows to contain other windows/apps.

More likely TaskBar customization will arise that allows customIcons to conain multiple apps/windows than a dated Tab implementation.

Re:Wrong

[Bwerf]

I've used VirtuaWin, and a bunch of other virtual desktop apps for Windows. And I have to agree with crispytwo (windows has nothing useful). That said, I'd be very happy if someone could prove me wrong.

Re:Wrong

[traycerb]

dexpot is free (though not open source) and very customizable. It has a few idiosyncracies (e.g. can't drag a window by a title bar to a different desktop), but even with them, it's better than the many other solutions I've tried.

Re:Wrong

[hairyfeet]

I'd have to put my vote in for AltDesk as being the best virtual desktop I've seen for Windows. Not free but works on every version of Windows from 98se to Windows 7 64bit, plenty of hotkey customizations, and if you really want to get fancy integrate it with Aston 2 for a truly custom desktop any way you want it.

After trying Altdesk and AstonShell on my Win2K years ago I don't think I could go back to the 2K/XP way of doing things. I'm using Windows 7 with Rocketdock to replicate some of the functionality I had on my old Astonshell but I think I'll probably go back to Aston. It is just too easy to customize the workspace for YOUR way of doing things. Both have free trails if anybody wants to give them a spin for 30 days and both are really nice and solid pieces of software that let you customize your Windows experience far more than I thought was possible.

For multiple desktops in Windows i would have to give AltDesk two big thumbs up.

Re:Simply put

[causality]

As long as it's stable and doesn't consume resources unduly, why wouldn't you want the option?

Because to a lot of people on /. (and everywhere else, to be sure) the way they do things is the One True Way, and anyone who disagrees with their way of doing things is clearly evil, insane, or a moron (possibly all three.) "My workflow is Good And Right; yours is Inferior And Must Be Destroyed. Users must not even have the option to follow your unclean way, lest they be tempted from the path of righteousness!" That kind of thing.

You might have meant that to be facetious (or maybe you didn't) but I have often noted the same. For most non-trivial things, there are matters of taste, preference, or opinion about which extremely informed experts can legitimately disagree. Yet there is often a great desire to make a pissing contest of these things. Some people have a very strong need to be right, and it's not good enough for them that they are "right"; someone else must also be "wrong". I believe this is rooted in some kind of personal insecurity. That is, they derive their personal security from trying to dominate or feel superior to others, rather than viewing personal security as something that comes from within. You really nailed it, however: the tendency is marked by an inability to disagree with someone on a matter of taste/preference/opinion without also portraying that person as stupid.

I suppose that behavior has some "success", if you want to call it that, among people who are either insecure themselves (and thus intimidated by the idea that someone might think they are stupid) or unfamiliar with argumentation. When used on such people, it must achieve the desired result of a sense of superiority at least some of the time, or else it would not be so commonly practiced. However, for anyone not fitting that description, such techniques immediately and unmistakably betray the weakness of the position of anyone who uses them. They can even make a position weak that otherwise would be factually or technically correct. Usually, they also reveal various personal shortcomings. This makes the use of such techniques a sure way to humiliate oneself when dealing with anyone who can see through them.

Haiku OS tabbed windows prototype

[GeLeTo]

Haiku OS has a tabbed windows prototype - see a video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccniJHjo_Uw You can skip to 3:40 to see it in action

Less Simply put

[dov_0]

As someone who argued strongly with the Nautilus team for tabs a couple of years ago, I love tabs in applications. gedit, nautilus, firefox, gnome-terminal etc all have tab capabilities and I find all of them quite useful for having several things running IN THE SAME APPLICATION at once. Tabs within a lot of apps make sense. I find it hard however to find grouping applications together such a useful feature. I like to size my app windows differently, depending on the window layout for instance. The only common use I can really think of is connecting an open file browser window to an app. Past that, laying things out in separate desktops would seem to be a far neater alternative. If I'm really busy, I just double my number of desktops.

This being KDE however, I can kinda understand where they are coming from. They seem to be pushing more and more to become a viable desktop environment alternative for Microsoft Windows as well as in Linux, so tabbing applications could make a lot more sense for MS Windows users who are only used to one desktop.

My real concern however is that while KDE has some absolutely fantastic apps, great code and brilliantly logical ideas behind how they design their desktop environment, I've never found it stable enough to install on anyone's pc. It's just too easy to stuff up the taskbar etc and too busy/confusing for people who aren't very computer literate. In fact I've seen KDE (both 3 and 4) turn those interested in trying Linux into people who really distrust any Linux desktop. It's a real shame as there is a lot of really great work done in KDE.

Re:Less Simply put

[dov_0]

I've never found it stable enough to install on anyone's pc. It's just too easy to stuff up the taskbar etc and too busy/confusing for people who aren't very computer literate.

What exactly do you mean here by not stable? KDE 4.3 is stable as could be on my system. KDE 3.5 was too, although the earlier KDE 4 releases obviously had there problems.

By using 'stable' I mean more a stable user experience than straight code. Sure. Things crash. That's part of using software. On occasion things just don't work right, but with KDE I found that it was too easy for users to accidentally remove things from the task bar for example. Even if I had things locked down as much as I could, a simple sweep of the touchpad could have really strange consequences. I had to remove it from 3 or 4 computers after the users wanted to try it out, but found it too hard to use without things going wrong. Sure, none of these people were highly computer literate at all, but KDE is supposed to be easy to use.

Apart from building giveaway computers for disadvantaged students, I currently have pc's running Linux in three rooming houses for international students. I just can't risk putting KDE onto them without writing a script to replace the home folder with a clean default config every boot. Instead, I just configure wonderful, boring old Gnome to look as much like XP as possible, lock everything down so the students can't screw it up and do updates over the network once a fortnight. Half the time I don't even think they realise it's not XP until their pirate copies of Photoshop won't install. By contrast, when my mates had KDE on their pc's I was out every week fixing the stupid things.

Re:Simply put

[LordVader717]

I think the problem is that the Windows task bar just isn't very good. What made tabbed browsing so convenient was that you could load a web page with one click of the mouse while the last one was still open. Doing the same thing with new windows in the task bar is clumsy

Re:Simply put

[Runaway1956]

"I use 'spaces' on the mac or multiple desktops on linux (windows has nothing useful) for the same thing now."

Ditto the above. I can't see how tabbed windows will improve my computing experience one whit. If anything, it's just one new gimmick that I have to learn to use the computer. Dammit, I like things the way I have them now, don't go changing things around, yet again.

Re:Simply put

[Runaway1956]

"What workspaces need though is the ability to create workspaces when you need them and destroy them when they're unneeded as opposed to having a fixed number of them,"

I'm using a Gnome desktop on Ubuntu Intrepid. I right click the desktop icon at the bottom right of the desktop, and I get a GUI menu in which I can do exactly that. It takes all of about 5 seconds.

As for identifying them, each desktop icon has an icon in it, identifying which application is maximized in it. I don't know if that meets your requirements, or if not, why not. You didn't mention what distro you use, or what desktop environment.

Re:Simply put

[Nested]

I use three desktops and bind Spaces to F1 and then Expose Show All Windows to F2. So a quick hit of F1 then F2 shows a complete overview of everything I'm working on. Love for the OS X.

YouTube have it

[Macka]

There's a nice walk through of some of the KDE 4.4 additions in this YouTube clip. The Window Grouping preview starts at 4:28 into the show.

Taking a step backwards?

[synthesizerpatel]

Isn't the point of having a windowed user interface that you can multiple windows concurrently open _next_ to each other? If you tab them contextually you then limit interaction to a single window. So, next big thing? How about, the old thing we all know?

It's an interesting idea to group applications by task into what would essentially become an IDE. That model only works if you can save and restore the context in some efficient manner that you can tear-down and rebuild on the fly.

Re:Simply put

[KibibyteBrain]

But Workspaces have been around for years and years and have never caught on. This model might offer greater usability. Also, it reduces two use modes to one, as people already use tabbed applications. It's worth experimenting with, at least.

Re:BeOS

[izomiac]

True, although you could slide the tabs around and almost replicate the feature. Haiku has improved in this area and has a feature called Stack and Tile.

Mac: Its a design perspective

[bussdriver]

Mac windows are DOCUMENT centric; multiple windows represent multiple documents - this is why it did not matter in the early years that only 1 application could run at a time (except Desk Accessories.) This is also why the menu bar is disconnected; remains at the top, and indicates the frontmost application - the MENUBAR is application centric. The document paradigm comes from Xerox.

Windows is application centric. So the menus go inside the application window and there is trend to give the application the whole screen space because its trapped (perspectivly) inside the window. This results in multiple documents being document centric windows inside an application window; which is confusing initially. OR they run multiple instances of the same application (appearance wise) to make it more document centric in behavior to avoid the nested window confusion. IE is an example of this; with the new IE tabs providing a document level "task bar" for switching IE documents within 1 application window as well as avoid the task bar clutter caused by lacking document centric windows.... A bunch of patches to what initially was a mistake; proven by the need to change so much of it.

Re:Simply put

[Dude McDude]

If you go and double-check your collection you'll find that it's Jo and Nella

Re:Simply put

[ddegirmenci]

Rather the sementic web, maybe?

tiling window managers

[pydev]

Long ago, tiling window managers were more popular than they are today. They allow you to split the screen into a bunch of non-overlapping regions and then place windows within each region, usually using some sort of tab or menu selection mechanism.

You can still get these today in the form of Ion and RatPoison and similar window managers. Unfortunately, window managers like Ion have a horrendously bad user interface, using myriads of keyboard commands and providing little in the way of visual guidance.

It would be really nice if some of the major desktop environments actually provided a user-friendly tiling window manager. This would mean using standard "split window" components for splitting the screen, and indicating available windows within each tile using tabs. Tabs could be dragged and dropped between tiles.

I think this would actually help a lot of beginners, since overlapping windows still confuse many users.

Re:Simply put

[BrokenHalo]

But Workspaces have been around for years and years and have never caught on.

On Windows, that might be because not many people went to any trouble to publicise or install them. Most Linux or *nix desktops have had workspaces by default for so long, they've become an integral and normal part of the way people work, and for most people they are now indispensible.

Actually

[commodoresloat]

If you want to combine the best of OSX and Windows, you absolutely need Switcher.

Actually, if you combine the best of OS X and Windows, what you get is OS X.

The tabbed interface, 0.3.56

[hedge49]

This is all beginning to sound like Lotus Notes. Boy, was that a fun environment.

Re:Simply put

[Dr. Spork]

What? I always do this with Firefox. I have it set to open new windows instead of new tabs, and my window manager is what sorts out the "tabbing" - that's what it's for. Also, when I middle-click a link it opens a new window. I have absolutely no interest in Firefox or any other application taking over this window management task, and to me, that's exactly what the tab bar does. Luckily, it's easy to disable all tab use in Firefox.

Re:Simply put

[mwvdlee]

Are you able to open/close an entire workspace in one go, while retaining the state and content?

Like most people, I often have multiple windows/applications opened while working on a single project and those are usually the same for that project. Start another project and I have to close all of them and open up a set of different applications and windows (possibly even the same applications but with different documents opened).

It'd be great if I didn't have to do all that every time I change the project I want to work on.