[midenginedcoupe]

I'm confused.

The homepage explicitly calls out that "Cate is not a window manager replacement" yet as far as I can tell pretty much all its features are window management. And the ones that aren't would be better off living in their own dedicated apps anyway (or aren't going to replace people's preferred editors or terminals).

The infinite canvas idea sounds cool, and I'm not aware of a window manager that lets you zoom and pan around a massive "desktop", but it really does sound like the cool bits would be better implemented as an actual window manager. Then we can keep using our favourite IDEs, terminals, editors, etc. etc which is where the actual friction for change sits, and have the cool infinite canvas/docking/arranging stuff on top.

[jon-wood]

I totally agree that this should be a window manager (and I'd really love it to be one, my brief poke at this has just made me want my entire operating system to work like this). I can see why you'd start by prototyping at least in a single app context though, it gives you immediate cross platform support rather than just targeting Linux which is the only place you can really build a window manager this different to what the OS expects, and its just a generally more tractable problem.

[philipallstar]

Why would you say a window manager would be better? I can imagine for power users maybe, and definitely for architecture astronauts, but being able to have workspaces managed by an app that can control all of a set of "windows" being opened at once depending on what work is being done is a lot more functional. And you can have your email etc open in a separate real OS window.

[midenginedcoupe]

Pretty much all of it, really.

If you want their fancy windowing stuff, I think you also need to use their apps. Terminal, IDE, etc etc. Switching to a different terminal is friction, switching to a different IDE is a really big jump. My bet is most people aren't going to switch to a different IDE just to get different window management behaviours. And if the bundled IDE is brilliant, then you can't use that without this window management coming along for the ride too.

The differentiator for this project is the window management. Don't restrict that to just the re-implemented apps within the walled garden, and then you have the behaviour implemented in the right place.

[fhennig]

I think the infinite canvas is a key feature, so you couldn't just disregard this to make it into a window manager.

[jon-wood]

You could absolutely (on some platforms) make a window manager which is an infinite canvas.

[fhennig]

But at the moment it's cross platform.

[BlueBerry2001]

That’s fair. I probably need to explain that distinction better. Cate is not trying to replace the OS window manager globally. It’s more a project workspace where terminals, browser previews, notes, agents, editors, and docs can stay arranged together and be restored per project. A native WM version would be interesting, but the app approach makes it easier to test the workflow across macOS, Windows, and Linux without asking people to replace their desktop setup.