html lang="en" {
	head { HEAD }
	body {
		header {
			div .head {
				h1 {-Windowing Considered Harmful}
				INCLUDE(nav.gsp)
			}

			figure .quote {
				blockquote {
					p {-Sugar is the new gunpowder}
				}
				figcaption {-Sayed Jawad al-Qazwini}
			}
		}

		main {
			p {=
				As of late I’ve been thinking up ideas about a potential future
				text-editor of mine.  One standard feature of nearly all text
				editors worth their salt is windowing: the ability to have
				two-or-more files open side-by-side or in other configurations.
				At a surface level this might seem like a no-brainer feature —
				and one which can substantially increment on the user-experience
				— but I think we can do better …by removing it all together.
			}

			p {=
				What I am not suggesting is that people should remove windowing
				from their workflows entirely — windows are incredibly useful and
				even more so on larger monitors.  I instead suggest that we begin
				delegating the task of windowing to the tool that does windowing
				best: the window manager.
			}

			p {=
				Window managers come in all sorts of shapes and sizes.  Most
				computer users will be using @em{-floating} window managers;
				these are the window managers where you open a window and the
				window pops up somewhere random on your screen.  As the user it’s
				your job to resize the window, move the window where you want it,
				etc.  This is the standard behaviour on the classic MacOS or
				Windows system, along with most mainstream Linux systems.
			}

			p {=
				There are also other forms of window managers such as
				@em{-tiling} window managers.  These are more popular in the
				Linux space although you can find these for other systems too.
				The idea behind a tiling window manager is that you delegate the
				positioning and sizing of windows to your window manager.  The
				methods that tiling window managers use to cut up the screen
				varies but typically you can expect that launching an application
				will cause it to take up the full width and height of the screen,
				while launching a second application will cause the screen to be
				segmented into two halves, with one window taking up 50% of the
				screen on the left and another taking up 50% of the screen on the
				right@sup{-MKREF(wm)}.
			}

			p {=
				Why do I mention all of this?  I mention this because I want to
				emphasize the fact that window management is not an easy task,
				and we all have different preferences for how we want it done.
				This means that unless you implement an entire window management
				solution into your text editor complete with tiling- and floating
				window management options, some large subset of your users are
				going to be having an experience that is suboptimal compared to
				what they could be having.  Not only is it suboptimal, but it
				differs from the standard behaviour of their system.
			}

			hr{}

			aside data-ref="REF(wm)" {=
				This is very dependent on the window manager being used and the
				users configuration of it of course, but this holds in the
				general case in my personal experience.
			}

			h2 #code-gone {-Where’d My Code Go?}
			p {=
				There is a second issue that implementing windowing in your
				editor results in, specifically this is an issue that is
				extremely prevalent if you use a tiling window manager: it is the
				issue of your code disappearing, allow me to explain in three
				pictures.
			}

			figure {
				figcaption {-Split Windows in Emacs}
				img width="100%" src="split.avif"
						alt="An Emacs instance with two split Emacs windows"
				{}
			}

			figure {
				figcaption {-Oops!  Firefox Made My Code Unreadable!}
				img width="100%" src="oops.avif"
						alt="The window split with Emacs and Firefox on each side"
				{}
			}

			figure {
				figcaption {-Making Things Better}
				img width="100%" src="better.avif"
						alt="The window split in three panes, not two"
				{}
			}

			p {=
				The problem here is quite clear: because I use a tiling window
				manager, opening Firefox to read some documentation caused my
				screen to be split into two halves — one for Emacs and one for
				Firefox — rendering my Emacs buffers unreadable.  This is
				completely correct behaviour from my window manager and I don’t
				expect it to behave any differently, but it is clearly not ideal.
				The result we want is the result seen in the third image, where
				the window is split into 3 parts allowing me to more easily read
				my Emacs-lisp code while simultaneously reading documentation in
				my browser.
			}

			p {=
				So how do we go from the second image to the third image?  The
				answer is obvious: we used three windows.  Instead of having one
				dedicated Emacs window that itself manages two sub-windows, by
				simply breaking it up into two separate Emacs instances each
				displaying only a single file, I allowed my window manager to
				make a more informed decision about where to place my web
				browser.  Intuitively this should make sense; if we have two
				files in one Emacs window our window manager will have no idea
				that we want to see three different things when we launch
				Firefox; it will only be aware that we want to see Emacs and
				Firefox side-by-side.
			}

			p {=
				Now we need to keep in mind the usability issues that windowing
				in text editors attempt to solve; it is unreasonable to expect
				the user to need to manually and laboriously open a new instance
				of their text editor, navigate to the project they’re working on,
				open a file, etc., all just to view two related files
				side-by-side.  The reason we all use windowing in our editors is
				because of how convenient it is to be able to simply click a
				button or execute a key-binding and instantly have a second
				buffer of text appear on our screen.
			}

			h2 #solution {-The Solution}
			p {=
				This is not as difficult of a problem as we might imagine though,
				and as I’ll discuss it’s actually not even an unsolved problem.
				The first potential solution is to just make your text editor not
				slow.  We live in the 21@sup{-st} century with hardware that is
				unbelievably fast; there is absolutely no reason why your editor
				should not so instantly open that it’s done before your finger
				has left the enter key or the left-click mouse button.  Of course
				most software doesn’t do this, but we are living in a world of
				never-before-seen inefficient and slow software.
			}

			p {=
				The second solution is a more technically involved one, but one
				that has seen real success: the server-client model.  The idea
				here is that when you use your editor it spins up a server (or
				dæmon) with which the editor (the client) will connect to and
				communicate with.  When you want to open a new file in a second
				window, your client can simply launch a second instance of itself
				that connects to the same dæmon process.  This should in theory
				also help to improve startup times as little initialization will
				need to be done, most of it will need to instead be done by the
				server which after the first client has spawned will already be
				complete.
			}

			p {=
				This server-client model also solves a second important usability
				issue I have yet to mention in this presentation, and that is
				shared state between your windows.  Many editors such as Vim or
				Emacs have their own clipboards, bookmarks, and registers which
				the user can create, store information to, etc., during regular
				usage of the program.  When a user stores data in their clipboard
				in one window that data should be accessible in the other (but
				not in a totally unrelated editor session where you’re working on
				an unrelated project).  By using the client-server model all this
				information can be stored on the server, and connecting clients
				simply use the server as a middle-man to broadcast changes to
				this shared state between other clients.
			}

			p {=
				As mentioned earlier, this is not a new novel concept and has
				seen actual success in practice.  Emacs is perhaps the best
				example of this where many users will spawn an Emacs dæmon on
				their system and then connect to that dæmon via the Emacsclient
				client program.  This allows for both dramatically improved
				startup performance, and shared state between client instances.
			}

			p {=
				Another editor that uses such as idea is Kakoune.  Kakoune in
				fact was designed with a philosophy that I find myself deeply
				aligned with; it doesn’t even have the editor windowing support
				that I rail against in this presentation.  If a user wants to
				open multiple buffers in a Kakoune session they must actually
				spawn multiple Kakoune clients which will communicate with a
				server.  All window management is delegated to specialized tools
				such as Tmux or your window manager.
			}
		}

		footer { FOOT }
	}
}