[discmonkey]

It would be great to implement some of the windowing improvements as an addition to a current linux windowing system.

Pinning different applications together or being able to merge applications with tabs both sound useful... These sorts of ideas are why it's great to have another open source OS.

[djur]

Tabbed window managers have existed for X11 for ages, but the concept only seems to have remained popular in tiling WMs, not stacking WMs. KDE had built-in support for tabbed windows for a while but it looks like the feature disappeared a few years back, which suggests it wasn't being used much.

[michaelmrose]

Good points. Although tiling may be a departure wanted or unwanted from your normal workflow i3wm does provide support for tabbing arbitrary applications together however this neither supporting merging 2 tabbed application into a single level of tabs nor does it fully support using window manager tabs in place of application tabs because of the inherent lack of context that would require a deeper sort of integration.

For example in your browser you might want in its UI to open a particular link in the background or foreground or perform an operation on all tabs or a subgroup thereof that is specific to browser tabs that wouldn't make sense in the broader context like bookmarking, saving a session, sending to another device etc.

There is a good argument for opening a window in the fore or background being exposed to the application but it doesn't at present work that way.

Regarding multitab operations, do you display only the options that make contextual sense or perhaps list all the options that make sense?

Example 3 firefox tabs and 2 Emacs tabs in a group. Show bookmark all firefox tabs and save all Emacs tabs as operations that can be done to the group? Possibly show only the relevant options if some subset are selected. Example if only 3 firefox tabs are selected show only those operations.

There is an argument for retaining multiple levels of tabbing at the OS level and the application level other than simplicity. Often when you want to perform a group operation the app is an already defined group for that operation, and in addition it often makes more sense to page through application tabs and windows separately rather than as a singular operation. For example going one window to the left for your editor while leaving the existing firefox tab focused rather than having to hit a different shortcut to jump up a level.

I think it would be interesting if you could have like application windows automatically vertically tabbed like Firefox's tree style tabs and have a contextual option to either break out to a new tree or open a different applications link as a child tab of the tree.

One could then optionally switch between showing trees side by side/top bottom or joining them into a horizontal tab group.

Ideally operations performed on multiple tabs could be performed by hitting a singular hotkey or button that would present all relevant options without going into each apps menu or pressing a different key or ui per app.

This would however be both complicated and require coordination between players that would likely be impossible.