[NitpickLawyer]

I really like the amount of exploration going on right now in this space. Even if this particular project (or the many terminal trackers/mergers/splitters, session managers, etc) don't end up being the thing, exploration is useful and might inform the next platforms.

The IDE has been "static" for most of the past ~20 years, with obvious improvements, but they were always incremental. The kind of exploration we see now is a bit more extreme, and I like it. It also seems like a lot of people are looking for alternatives, and I like some ideas. Even the funky ideas (I once saw a post comparing and proposing IDEs to follow RTS games UI) are interesting. Who knows what might stick.

[jauntywundrkind]

Excellent post. Thank you.

I love looking through awesome-web-desktops. Most aren't infinite canvases but they are canvases, canvases of programs. There's fun stuff. UI paradigms being cooked up. I'll pitch in particular AetherOS, as being a neat web desktop that also is interestingly connected, networked, which is neat. https://github.com/syxanash/awesome-web-desktops https://bsky.app/profile/aetheros.computer

I do think we need to ask a little more "what next?". Taking Niri as a real desktop example, it's just so good, such simple but enjoyable new bones for a doing computing atop. So close to what was but so unique and nice. It intuitively connects me to the many many what ifs all around, makes me feel like there's such imminent possibility.

Especially today, who can make a UI that can be spoken well with, that is conversationally capable: that frontier feels barely explored. 9p is by far far far the most agentic desktop we have ever had, looked at this way. So beyond how it looks and works, how do computing surfaces express themselves?

[verve_rat]

Agreed. I'm actually excited to hope for a cambrian explosion of IDE experiments.

LLM powered visual diagramming of the code as you work? The ability to edit the diagrams and have tje LLM apply that back to the code? Visualisation of test coverage over the UI you are working on? Allowing you to attach user submitted videos of bugs directly to tests in the code?

I don't know if any of that is a good idea, but I really hope a bunch of people try.

[BlueBerry2001]

Yeah, I agree. I think we are in an interesting phase where people are rethinking the “IDE as one fixed rectangle” model. Cate is one attempt at that from the spatial side: persistent canvases, terminals, browsers, notes, agents, docks, tabs, splits, worktrees etc. It may not be the final shape, but I think there is room for more experimentation around how long-running AI/dev workflows are organized.

[norman784]

I was exploring a similar approach, but not focused on AI, my idea was basically group projects by workspace, where each workspace has a path and is related to a project, you can spawn terminals, editor and web browser windows in this workspace, the web browser cookies and such should be associated to a workspace, that way it will not leak between workspaces and also this allows you to have different sessions opened in different workspaces.

Unlike Cate, the windows of the terminals, editor, browser, etc, each one was handled similarly like Niri tiling scrolling window manager, that way you can use the keyboard to move around, where you can group windows in a column or split them, have different sizes, is not quite where you have a free form, but an horizontal collection of windows that you can scroll.

[hnlmorg]

I’m building something like this right now.

I’m already using it as my primary terminal emulator and have recently just been adding LSP support to the code editor.

[jrgd]

I would love to have something like this I used itermocil when i was on macos, that was limited to iterm windows. On Linux, I have been playing/exploring with Hypr but without much success so far.

[mapcars]

Now with AI I find myself in need for a space that can combine multiple repos into a single "project". For example for debugging an issue across the system, or asking it to verify if FE/BE communication schema has any mismatch, or describing the complete feature flow from one end to another.

Is Cate's canvas per git-repo or can I add multiple?

[2muchcoffeeman]

Maybe Repomix?