The original note, as written at the time
PC operating system update for me to achieve a better GUI. It should be possible to tell windows to go to the back or come to the front. The screen area should be subdividable into up to 16 cells. Each file explorer window should have tabs as with browsers, which I think Windows 11 may have partially implemented.
Ongoing development
A screen that can be subdivided into up to sixteen cells, with windows sent to the back or brought to the front at will, and file explorer windows tabbed the way browsers have been for twenty years.
This is a small idea and it is the one I would implement first, because it is free and it changes how a person works all day.
We have 34-inch screens and we use them like a single sheet of paper with one thing on it. The window manager assumes a scarcity of pixels that stopped existing a decade ago. Sixteen cells is not about fitting more in; it is about being able to put a thing in a place and know it will still be there.
Tabs in the file explorer are the other half, and it is genuinely strange that they took this long. Navigating folders is a stack of windows, one per location, and any task that involves moving between two locations makes a mess on the screen. A browser solved this before the browser was called that.
The back-and-front requirement is the detail that tells you the author has actually worked this way. Sending a window to the back — not minimising it, not closing it, not moving it aside — is what you want when you have a reference you need to keep watching but not interact with. Every current system offers minimise, which destroys the thing you wanted.
None of this requires new hardware, and almost none of it requires new software. It requires somebody to decide that the screen is a workspace rather than a document.
The reason to take it seriously in a collection like this: the gains we chase are usually large and rare. This one is small and daily.