Mat Duggan proposes making tmux the operating system for everyday users: a scrollable, session-persisted, detachable, task-oriented interface that treats windows as persistent objects and supports rapid context switching across changing displays. He argues current window management fails because people move between screens frequently, use monitors in distinct roles (focal work versus peripheral glance), and fall into three interaction styles - maximizers, near-maximizers, and meticulous arrangers - while juggling private and public windows. Docking and undocking collapses carefully arranged layouts, browsers behave like mini-operating systems with tabs that act as complex apps, and the traditional filesystem has eroded as content lives inside app silos, breaking the historic file-edit-send chain.
Existing research and tools point to concrete fixes: Henderson and Card’s Rooms treats the screen like memory and preloads task contexts to reduce “knowledge faulting”; WindowScape records workspace “photographs” so windows can appear in multiple task contexts; tiling window managers remove overlap but remain too technical for most users. The proposal centers on a user-friendly, scrollable tiling manager (Niri is a working example) and making web app contents first-class OS windows rather than letting browsers subsume the desktop (Arc and Chrome OS pursued that other path). The recommended design elements are persistence, infinite scrollable workspace, and task-oriented grouping to bring tmux-style workflows to normal users.
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