Comment by shortrounddev2
5 days ago
I've wanted to create an IDE which uses a multi-window design. I think most IDEs are just doing a left-drawer bottom-drawer layout where the left drawer has all your files in a tree and the bottom drawer has your terminal. I've somewhat recently taken to detaching the solution explorer from the main window in Visual Studio and I'm kind of enjoying it. It's like what used to be GIMP's original default interface, with a main editing canvas and a few floating toolboxes
Emacs lets you have as many windows as you like, and you can mix and match terminal and GUI windows all connected to the same session
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IntelliJ lets you detach separate windows for almost all of the minor panes.
Click on the 3 dots on the top bar, View Mode, Window. It works for example for the file tree, Runners pane, Terminals etc. And it's easy to "dock" them again (an icon shows up in the window to do that) so you can try it easily.
I always keep some stuff like diffs, for example, in separate windows, it just makes me less confused about what's "temporary buffers" (as you would say in emacs) VS "actual files".