Browser embedded in panes?

[Myles Recny]

What would it take to be able to have a browser (say chrome) embedded
in an iTerm pane. I love the idea of being able to look at
documentation / code or email / code in adjacent panes - and never
really having to leave iTerm.

[George Nachman]

This thought crossed my mind the other day, but I'm not sure if it's practical. Chrome updates very frequently and has a much better update mechanism than we do. They also add features to the browser UI (the part that I would be implementing if this were done) faster than I can. So in the long run it would always be an inferior browser to chrome. What you really want is a better window manager. I don't know if that's possible to implement, but I think it would be a better experience if successful.

[Evan Laforge]

On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 8:50 PM, George Nachman <gnac...@llamas.org> wrote:
> This thought crossed my mind the other day, but I'm not sure if it's
> practical. Chrome updates very frequently and has a much better update
> mechanism than we do. They also add features to the browser UI (the part
> that I would be implementing if this were done) faster than I can. So in the
> long run it would always be an inferior browser to chrome. What you really
> want is a better window manager. I don't know if that's possible to
> implement, but I think it would be a better experience if successful.

I would love a tiling window manager for OS X. Then iterm could get
rid of the tiling feature entirely and hand it off to an application
specialized for the task. There are a few for X which have more
features than you could ever want, and it would integrate with the
rest of the system.

Unfortunately, as far as I know it's not possible to do that under OS
X short of XDarwin. And if iterm just keeps embedding other apps,
it's just turning into a window system of its own, at which point
you're just back at X only less standard. I would love to have an
apple hacker tell me I'm wrong and you *can* have one program manage
the windows of another program in OS X...

You'd think apple would be into tiling with the new iphone-esque
emphasis, but apparently they're going in an expose kind of direction.

[George Nachman]

I suspect the only way it could be done would be to provide an interprocess API + client library (like Growl has) that coordinates window positioning. Programs would need to specifically offer support for it, but for those that did it could be a very slick experience. That integration would be nontrivial for a lot of apps, though; certainly the assumptions made for the Visor mode would have to be segregated.

[Arnau Rebassa]

Hi all,

> I would love a tiling window manager for OS X.

I'm using sizeup (www.irradiatedsoftware.com) to do that, I'm
completly lost with it. There are other alternatives like divvy. I
think it's worth to take a look to them.

Cheers!
--
Arnau