Absolutely. I miss having multiple windows, each with one or more tabs, all respectful of my screen real estate!
With most IRC clients or multi protocol chat programs you could have a couple of important channels always visible on a second monitor, key people you DM a lot in a tabbed window somewhere prominent, active chats open next to your work, and everything else in the main app window, minimised.
Now we have a website (wrapped in an app, if we’re lucky) with next to no layout control. It’s nothing short of a disastrous step backwards.
I’m convinced the recent resurgence of the terminal is partly due to the complete abandonment of GUI applications for most forms of professional computing.
We desperately need a new framework for applications:
- offline first
- local first
- data first
- standardised types and APIs
- as composable as the terminal
- standard controls across all apps
- standard window and document model
- web views considered harmful
- UX and “customer journey” designers considered worse
> Now we have a website (wrapped in an app, if we’re lucky) with next to no layout control. It’s nothing short of a disastrous step backwards.
This is true of Element, but you can have a Matrix client with any form you like. There already exist several. So it's not the most compelling criticism here IMO, because those who are using Element have chosen it over other options.
I still feel that my criticism applies to where the money and development effort seem to be focused, even for Matrix, but I am a big fan of Matrix overall and agree that it does at least have a variety of better clients.
It’d be great to see every Slack replaced with a Matrix server for sure.
With most IRC clients or multi protocol chat programs you could have a couple of important channels always visible on a second monitor, key people you DM a lot in a tabbed window somewhere prominent, active chats open next to your work, and everything else in the main app window, minimised.
Now we have a website (wrapped in an app, if we’re lucky) with next to no layout control. It’s nothing short of a disastrous step backwards.
I’m convinced the recent resurgence of the terminal is partly due to the complete abandonment of GUI applications for most forms of professional computing.
We desperately need a new framework for applications:
- offline first
- local first
- data first
- standardised types and APIs
- as composable as the terminal
- standard controls across all apps
- standard window and document model
- web views considered harmful
- UX and “customer journey” designers considered worse
We were nearly there, then “web 2.0” happened