It's comical how much time I've spent convincing people that tabs are a window manager feature not an application feature. People in the Alacritty issue on the subject were pissed!
I've heard this a lot on HN over the years but it doesn't make much sense to me. Some thoughts:
1. App tabs improves UX for 99.999% of users who aren't using a WM with a good tab solution (if one even exists).
2. WM tabs means launching a new app instance for every tab you might want vs having lightweight app tabs.
3. App tabs can do all sorts of app-level things and UX polish that dumb WM tabs can't do because they are so general. My terminal emulator tabs show a badge count of bell notifications, can be dragged around into groups, or dragging into other tabs as split panes. My browser tabs show you which tab is playing music and can impl right click -> mute.
4. I bet even the biggest WM tab cheerleader still uses browser tabs.
5. WM tabs are a different concern than app tabs, not a replacement. WM tabs are useful when you want tabs and the app doesn't provide a good tab metaphor or when you want to tile/group app instances a certain way. That doesn't mean it's not useful for the app instances themselves to have app tabs when it makes sense.
Agree on all the points, except 4. There are even people out there who use lynx as their primary browser :)
Although while I usually like tabs for most apps, I don't use tabs for terminal and rely either on window manager or tmux. I guess the difference is that I often want a mix of tabs and having multiple terminals side by side, whereas I don't really need that for a browser (or very seldom)
Sway had the better, though often tedious, WM tab solution that I've tried. Niri had a useless one.
I really tried to love sway splits and tabs for terminal windows. But I finally admitted I'd rather just alt-tab to a few different terminal apps, each with its own concern (maybe one per project, this one for my remote machine), and best of all, each with its own internal tabs.
That said, tabs in kitty and tmux, for example, are so basic that you don't necessarily lose much if you were to use WM tabs instead.
On the other hand, tabs in iTerm2, Ghostty, Cmux, probably macOS Terminal -- a bit more powerful and intuitive since you can do things like drag them, and they can show info like terminal state. And in some of those apps, they can be displayed vertically which is my favorite.
My favorite is still AwesomeWM, although I haven't used it in years. Nowadays I'm on mac and my "tiling manager" is about 6-7 custom functions I wrote in hammerspoon. Basically just tile left/right, full size, "reasonable" size + centered, and a shortcut that distributes all my apps in the virtual spaces I've assigned to them.
One of the reasons why I use tmux rather than i.e. iterm2 tabs is that I don't have to change any of my habits or learn extra shortcuts when I'm working with ssh.
I would love tabs for Spotify. I just discovered I can at least open new windows from the linux YouTube music client by middle clicking, a revelation !
Every application (or concept) can introduce “tabs”, but it means something wildly different for that particular application. Tabs (or instances) in an application immediately bumps into the concept of state (statefull vs stateless) in applications.
Sometimes, it makes perfect sense. The reason tabs made sense for web browsers since 2004 is because each web page could be thought of as a “stateless” instance of an application. You’re not asking for “tabs”, you wish every application could be “Stateless”. Stateless is a beautiful thing, until you understand what state is, and who needs to manage it.
If every “tab” of Spotify had no idea what the other “tab” is playing and you had to switch back and forth between tabs to pause-and-play songs, that would be a bug, not a feature. While 2 “windows” playing audio (if you instruct them to) is expected.
