The IDE has been "static" for most of the past ~20 years, with obvious improvements, but they were always incremental. The kind of exploration we see now is a bit more extreme, and I like it. It also seems like a lot of people are looking for alternatives, and I like some ideas. Even the funky ideas (I once saw a post comparing and proposing IDEs to follow RTS games UI) are interesting. Who knows what might stick.
Unlike Cate, the windows of the terminals, editor, browser, etc, each one was handled similarly like Niri tiling scrolling window manager, that way you can use the keyboard to move around, where you can group windows in a column or split them, have different sizes, is not quite where you have a free form, but an horizontal collection of windows that you can scroll.
LLM powered visual diagramming of the code as you work? The ability to edit the diagrams and have tje LLM apply that back to the code? Visualisation of test coverage over the UI you are working on? Allowing you to attach user submitted videos of bugs directly to tests in the code?
I don't know if any of that is a good idea, but I really hope a bunch of people try.
I see Cate also uses node-pty. I didn't know what psuedo terminals were before, it's cool stuff
The homepage explicitly calls out that "Cate is not a window manager replacement" yet as far as I can tell pretty much all its features are window management. And the ones that aren't would be better off living in their own dedicated apps anyway (or aren't going to replace people's preferred editors or terminals).
The infinite canvas idea sounds cool, and I'm not aware of a window manager that lets you zoom and pan around a massive "desktop", but it really does sound like the cool bits would be better implemented as an actual window manager. Then we can keep using our favourite IDEs, terminals, editors, etc. etc which is where the actual friction for change sits, and have the cool infinite canvas/docking/arranging stuff on top.
I have a miro board as a notepad, I constantly add new stuff but at the same time its unmanageable.
Another example could be browser tabs, since there's no limit my current window holds approximately 60 open tabs which (which I dont use ofc) - this is the effect of chrome not having a native way to save stuff for later in a semantic way (you cannot search through bookmarks the same way you would search through google).
The success of this project will be defined by how well and easy users are able to retain the context (or content) of their canvas.
Navigation in default Obsidian is one of the weakest points imo
I'm not sure what problem it actually solves or aims at solving other than being cool?
Visual orientation does matter in UX of the real world, video game worlds and to some degree operating systems, is this the goal?
Cate is an open source desktop workspace built around an infinite canvas. Instead of constantly switching between terminals, editors, browser previews, docs, and AI tools, you arrange everything spatially in one place.
Big improvements since the earlier posts:
docking, tabs, and splits detachable native OS windows git worktree support unified Cmd+K search much smoother rendering/performance on larger canvases AI provider + MCP integration Stack: Electron, React, Monaco, xterm.js/node-pty, Zustand.
Runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux. MIT licensed.
Would love feedback from people with heavy multi-window or terminal-based workflows.