Why are chrome tabs the way in which we interact with these intelligences?
Browser tabs seem to be the main way which people separate ideas and tasks which is frankly absurd!
- maybe also notes in folders in their machine
What isn't going to change across the way that we use the Internet. There is still gonna be information that needs to be transferred from servers to you. Currently that is done via websites. You have 50 chrome tabs open because you have no better system.
Why do I have to open chrome tabs to do different things to fire off different questions, why does this have to be inside the browser? Why can't this be some other surface? I mean, what's limiting about the browser? I guess everything has to be contained within a tab. It's inherently isolated. So I think a big gap is that these things can't be linked and connected in different ways. They can't be grouped. Tab groups are very archaic. I also can't really interact with files or previous work that you have done. Why aren't my notes in the browser? Why can't they be related? I don't think the interface to direct intelligence is a tab. You should be able to point it towards different sources on the internet. But it shouldn't just live restricted inside one.
Close them, reopen them
I think I am frustrated by chrome tabs, why do I have 10 open right now that I don't need, but can't close.
I should be able to close them and have them reopen when I want to begin that work again.
What is the alternative? What are the best shapes for people to digest?
- maps, visually we are great at navigating spaces?
- physical spaces? A room, an environment. Not everyone could shape rotate well enough with a map but a physical space for the relationship of ideas could make a lot of sense. (Would prob come along with AR.)
A friend said:
Maybe the room / save slot / open-thread thing is still useful, but only as a hypothesis for reducing the cost of leaving and re-entering a context, not as the goal itself.
The real problem might be something more like: how do I stop working on something without losing its state, and come back later without having to reconstruct the whole context in my head?
If a room helps with that, great. If something much simpler does it better, then the room is just another pretty mechanical object haha.
See Mechanical objects.
Hide them
A good interface should ruthlessly remove all elements. You should be fighting to keep something visible on the page.
Why do I have the tabs visible at the top of my screen anyway, this takes up so much visual noise.
Why don't I have them as a grid menu that I can toggle on / off to show me.
We already have the tridactyl "b" popup menu but the styling is janky.
Can I have the tabs render as a grid! I think we already keep the hover image data so we can just use that? (Not for sleepy tabs... but that's ok :D)
I think I also want the tabs to be "move"-able, I want some amount of visual feedback of them, at least for now.
- could this be a grid view that is toggle-able. Or could I even toggle on/off the heading?
Groups
Tab groups feels useful and in the right direction but not totally, it would require a lot from me to keep adding/removing (unless I hotkey it...).
I think my own quick sorting thing makes a lot of sense.
Show current groups, go through each tab and let me assign to whatever group. Or just give me a shortcut to assign current tab to group 1,2,3 etc (could be a letter to group, for agent warfare could be shortened to group w).
Groups could also be persistent or inferred from a list, previous projects etc.
Windows
Hm, maybe the bottleneck or unnecessary constraint is that we have just one Firefox window, workspaces don't get separated... Maybe I should use Linux to its full advantage and use different windows/workspaces. And actually I should be doing this with tmux too possibly, the tabs at the bottom can get in the way of each other, I should separate things by work rather than by window type (browser vs terminal). I do also wonder if there are large gains to be made by avoiding the browser at all costs. How far can I get just in the terminal?
Maybe the tiling manager is too rigid, too much structure, it is not often that I need to see all the splits at once. Maybe I would actually be better suited to have overlaying windows.
But I do think I have a lot of gains to make from just having better window management within Hyprland. My main workflows are either Firefox with tabs (can be improved with groups, and the better 'b' search) or tmux with tabs (this can also be improved with a telescope/harpoon).
And the switching between them isn't actually that bad. Alt-tab is fine. But remember from before, the work isn't the windows, it's usually semantically nuanced inside of each: some web tabs for some tasks, some nvim notes, agent instances, and terminals for others.
So is it a challenge of how we can group / sort the subgroups within each? And also between windows?
See One input surface.