this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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Electron has other drawbacks than performance as well.
The big one for me is that my workflow is based on vim, where you split tabs into buffers. There is no way to split a tab into windows in VSCode. Only windows into tabs, which is super dumb and annoying because related files are never shown together unless you click a bunch of tabs. Apparently the reasoning for this insane behavior is "yeah well electron is based on chromium so tough luck we can't do shit".
What do you mean by:
Do you mean, drag a tab out of a window to create a new window? Because if so, you can do that in vscode.
No, literally have one tab with multiple windows inside it (the default for vim).
I'm assuming for your example that only one tab is shown at a time?
In that case, you can do that in vscode, the only difference is the semantics of what is considered a "window", and what is considered a "tab".
To do this in vscode:
Have one window with four panes, and another window with three panes:
You can then switch between your windows (or "tabs" in your example) by keyboard shortcut.
In vscode, you can make the Panes different files, or even different views of the same file.
You mean a whole different window at the OS level? That's just a way inferior hack to the way vim does it by default.
I've found an issue from 2017 about it and this related one that focuses more specifically on supporting vim-like behavior. This is just, fundamentally, something that VSCode doesn't implement simply because of technical limitations. The extensions that attempt to recreate this behavior are apparently all quite janky.
I mean I don't care, I'm very happy with vim now. But the terribly naive tab support is the reason I left vscode for vim initially. People who have only known "vscode-like" tabs don't know what they are missing out on.
Yes, that way I could switch between windows in a single shortcut, or even place them side by side so I can see both at the same time with other shortcuts.
Can you explain this more?
Why wouldn't you want window management to be managed by the window manager?
Sorry, I didn't log into this account for a while.
Anyways, I guess in an ideal world the window management could be done fully via the window manager. In practice this doesn't work too well, because that would require a more complex protocol than currently exists. For VSCode for instance, that would require disabling the native tabbing feature (but keeping the native splitting because otherwise I'll end up with duplicated panes such as the file list) and implementing something custom to translate tab operations to sway-wm operations (in my case).
I guess it could work but it's not supported OOTB, and after a lot of work is probably going to end up being a lot more clunkier than what I have going on in vim.