Comment by WorldMaker
Comment by WorldMaker 2 days ago
If you are looking for some reasoning behind the "hype": one piece of it is that humans have relatively good contextual spatial memory and using one very large "space" that has a sort of "physicality" to it (you can scroll it; things generally stay where you put them; etc) can feel really good. It goes back to some of the early ideals of "spatial navigation" of the original "desktop metaphor". (Many of which have been somewhat lost to time, with a lot less emphasis on things like windows opening in the same appearance as when they were last closed.)
I think where scrolling WMs starts to feel like it scratches peculiar itches the most is when you have a complex multi-workspace config in a more traditional tiling WM. Each workspace is a different place. In some of the best cases the WM may give a metaphor that each workspace is on a cube or other polygon that you are switching faces on. Scrolling WMs simplify needing to do 3D compositing if you want to visualize that "space" at a distance or have nice flips between workspaces that provide spatial cues to your brain, because scrolling is a thing we do a lot. We have many apps with "infinite scrolling" today; applying that to one large workspace can feel like a nice space to have to arrange your windows in, and other common computer gestures like zoom out and then back in to a different part of it feel "natural". Navigating your "desktop" becomes just like navigating a large Excel file or a large code file.
I guess it's the 'large' part that turns me off. If it's actually far away so that you need to scroll a lot to get there, it just feels like it's more work to me. Sort of replicating one of the less appealing features of a physical desk, the mess that it quickly becomes if you manipulate a lot of documents. I don't even use workspaces that much for the same reason, and having tabs takes away a lot of the need I feel. You even retain some sense of physical distance because of the tab positions.
To stay with the physical analogy, the layout I've described is like always keeping all your documents in two neat stacks before you. Except that it's much easier and quicker to flip pages to the top than it would be with physical documents, so you're rarely tempted to start spreading them out.