We Still Don't Have Proper Workspaces

People want to run apps in specific contexts. One workspace is for fun, another for work, one account is public, another is personal. Modern operating systems introduced workspace concepts to address exactly this problem.

With agents, this problem became visible again. One work unit now usually means a bundle: agent/terminal + IDE + browser for that task + maybe an emulator for testing, plus temporary windows. And we can have several such workspaces at once, because while waiting for one agent you already want to launch a second and a third. Somewhere else you still keep a couple of messengers and lo-fi girl in a browser for entertainment. ✏️

If you try to manage this with plain windows, you quickly get lost trying to find the one you need. They all look almost the same. I even tried changing the IDE header color per project worktree. It helps a bit, but you still end up mashing Alt+Tab an unpredictable number of times. And not every app supports this anyway.

Browser tabs and terminal tabs are also clearly the wrong abstraction level.

Workspaces should help. But what happens if you have different browser instances open in two workspaces and click a link from another app? Which browser should open it? There is no correct answer. It depends on the OS, window manager, and probably moon phase. 🖥

We simply don't have a reliable way to stay scoped to a task inside one workspace and switch between them comfortably. Ideally, we should also be able to save and restore them. Right now we constantly fall out of the right flow.

And for some mysterious reason, computers still don't let us run multiple instances of the same app at the same time.

It would be great to run as many instances as we want - each in its own sandbox, inside a specific workspace. And all actions should be dispatched to the nearest running app instance that can actually handle them.