Make tmux the OS

I recently watched the talk by Scott Jenson titled "Are we really going to use the same Desktop UX forever?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7AfAcQwLW0&t=445s. He's a great presenter, really articulate and concise. The kind of speaker that you'd gladly listen to for 3+ hours if given the chance. Which for a talk about window management is quite the compliment. The overall point of the talk was "Apple and Microsoft aren't going to innovate anymore in the desktop OS space, so it is up to us all to decide what the desktop of the future is going to look like". I would argue that the actual situation to more nuanced than that, they're trying ideas they are just extremely conservative. As Jenson points out, a lot of what we treat as "how computers work" was a workaround for hardware we stopped having years ago. So why are we still accepting those tradeoffs?To be clear, I'm not a UI/UX designer. I don't know what I'm doing and I lack the skill to make this. I'm making this mostly as a thought exercise and hopefully a prompt to get other people to think about this same problem. I have, however, suffered through others bad choices, which turns out to be most of the qualifications required. TL;DR: The thing I want is "tmux is the OS", but I want tmux where a normal person could use it. I use it all the time, it's great, but is there a way to take the amazing experience of a scrollable, session-persisted, detachable, task-oriented system to normal people?What are the high-level problems with windows management in 2026?I think you can break the problem down to the following components:My screen real estate is constantly changing and I have a lot more of it. I am going from my laptop screen to my desktop monitor back to the laptop screen about 6 times a day. When I'm on my big monitor or multiple monitors, overlapping windows don't make sense because I have too much space as it is. First, one big monitor is a a different experience entirely compared to 2 smaller monitors. I don't use the two monitors as one large unbroken screen, I tend to use one of them for "less important static content" like a ToDo list or my work chat tool and my email and then the "primary" monitor for my terminal/tmux/browser which is how I do all my actual work. But windows "belong" to one or they "belong" to another. Grudin found in 2001 that people use a second monitor exactly this way, where focal work on one, peripheral glances on the other. Twenty-five years ago. The OS still doesn't know which monitor is doing one role and which the other. And when I pull the laptop out of the dock, everything collapses onto one screen and I manually drag and resize windows to claw back enough real estate to keep working. I don't know how much time this actually wastes for people, but it feels like it wastes a bunch. The OS treats a display change as a surprise, instead of as a scheduled event that happens six times a day.Different people use windows totally differently. We have three distinct groups of people that we are trying to design around, while most modern OS optimizes only for the first use case.Some people are window maximizers, where every window takes up most of the screen and then they use Command + Tab or the Dock or something else to switch between the bigger windows. The value of more screen real estate is mostly that this one big window can be even bigger. Some people are near maximizers, where one window takes up almost all of the screen real estate, but they'll have one or more smaller windows where they glance at things like status or chat or whatever. Finally there are people who carefully coordinate all of the windows on their screen. Almost everyone has "private windows" and "public windows". You are fine with your public windows being lined up and persisting, but you want to hide specific information in other windows from people walking by. The people I complain about are also the people I present quarterly numbers to. I never remember that when I connect my laptop to a display they're going to see my entire screen. I assumed this was just me with private vs public. But it was measured in 2004, in "Revisiting Display Space Management: Understanding Current Practice to Inform Next-generation Design." Same three types, same public/private split, twenty years ago. See how absolutely none of this is a new idea? Link. Browsers are mini operating systems. In 2026 everybody quietly agrees that most of your software runs in a browser tab. These web applications will cover a wide variety of use-cases that have historically been owned by local applications. My desktop OS treats a browser just like a normal application, when in fact it is closer to a virtualized OS running inside of my host OS.Tabs inside of a browser and windows of that browser contain the same level of complexity as my other applications. Tabs are associated with streams of work alongside my conventional applications. I'm writing Terraform in Vim in my terminal while referencing the Terraform docs for that provider.

I'll come back to it once you've met WindowScape.The concept of "filesystem" is an increasingly weak concept. My notes in Apple Notes belong to Apple Notes, not my filesystem. My texts live in iMessage's database, not my Documents folder. Teams and Slack content lives inside those applications unless I manually "bring it out," and when I do, I'm making a copy. Firefox will happily show me a PDF, but the PDF doesn't live with macOS unless I take an action to make it so.Now a lot of engineers are going to read that and think "well you cannot force all applications to use the same storage system for all of their files, are you a lunatic?!?". I'm not suggesting that, in fact the weak filesystem might be a perk. There is a CHI paper from 2004 called, and I am not making this up, "Stuff goes into the computer and doesn't come out." That was 2004 and we have the exact same problem with no real solution. Link.Here's why this is a windowing problem. Since Windows 95 and System 7 (which is basically as old as my memory goes back to), the machine has worked as a chain: something writes a file, the user opens an app on it, the app writes it back, the file gets sent to someone else, repeat. Every link in that chain assumed the file lived somewhere the OS could see. Every link is now broken in all the modern OS. What have people already tried?So I'm not the first person to see this problem. Some of it got solved, but in a different direction than I want. Some of it got solved, but not for normal people.I started with the document that I kept seeing everyone else cite to. Henderson, D. Austin and Stuart K. Card. “Rooms: the use of multiple virtual workspaces to reduce space contention in a window-based graphical user interface.” ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) 5 (1986): 211 - 243. Interesting that even back in the 80s there was a pretty clear understanding that the current system for managing windows wasn't very good. The design they were talking about looked something like this, which is pretty advanced compared to where we are. Henderson and Card measured window use the way operating systems people measured memory.

They described this as reducing "knowledge faulting in the user," which is the best phrase in the literature and I intend to use it until someone stops me. Just try it out in a corporate meeting: "we need to reduce knowledge faulting in the user". One of the more interesting side papers I found was "No Task Left Behind? Examining the Nature of Fragmented Work". Link. Mostly because it confirmed something I've long suspected, which is the single task for a long time focus on modern widowing systems isn't actually how people work. The title of the companion paper is a real participant quote: "Constant, constant, multi-tasking craziness." People were juggling around ten "working spheres" a day, minutes at a time.The closest to what I wanted is from the paper WindowScape: A Task Oriented Window Manager. Link.WindowScape dropped explicit grouping entirely so now every time you changed the arrangement, it took a photograph, and you went back into photographs instead of filling containers. I love their one-line diagnosis of every system before them: "requiring windows to be in a single group forces users to decide ahead of time where a new window belongs."