| I still use tabs in apps despite using i3 for years. This firefox window has 13 tabs and would be much much crappier if I used 13 i3 tabs. I couldn't open new firefox windows in the background and opening others in the foreground within firefox. I would have to use i3's horizontal tabs instead of tree style tabs making it harder to read the titles. I couldn't switch tabs separately from switching windows. This would make having firefox alongside another window suck because it would trivially become hard to navigate. I would have to manually put only the firefox windows in a tabbed layout with the other window outside of it. I would have to focus parent and then focus direction to switch to the other. This would be so for any window I want to use alongside it even briefly. I couldn't close entire trees of tabs at once. I couldn't close everything except the current tree. I couldn't save a particular set of tabs as a session to be restored later. In theory could these features be implemented in an i3 specific nature? Perhaps so long as you are willing to do so for every specific environment and for every individual app. If we pick 100 apps and the most popular 10 environments and the most desired 10 features we will find we only have 10,000 tasks ahead of us! Tabbed environments within i3 ARE useful but not as a replacement for tabbed interfaces within applications. |
My frustration, fundamentally, is that I don't want every app that wants to use some kind of tabbing interface to be different. Use different shortcuts, different models. I would rather the WM/DE provide a holistic approach that can be inclusive of all or at least most of the basic needs you keep listing, and that could be applied to other programs in a uniform way.
That's beyond the imagination of Microsoft apparently (I agree that just making taskbar items clump isn't the same), and beyond the scope of an x11 WM (which doesn't have any meaningful say over the client area of any program on its own). But it's not impossible, and it's not "the wrong way" just because no one's tried or managed to do it yet.