I've often wondered if all they are missing is eye tracking and the ability auto tilling manager? I'd love to be able to press ctrl, look at three windows in my zoomed out view, and then release and have all 3 of them be distributed by a normal tiling window.

I agree that laying things out on an infinite 2d plane is surprisingly time consuming. We must be missing some affordance or something in how this should be?

this stuff was huge for a while, 20-25 years ago, digital libraries, information exploration, ... consider even things like minority report, or more prosaically, all the demos coming out of MIT medialab.

It never really caught on, completed got clobbered by free text search, now AI chat interfaces I guess.

Am glad to see it bubble up again, because have good memories working on this stuff.

Figma is a good example of this UI paradigm done well, lots of users, and financial success.

>They mostly do not gain a lot of users.

Ever used a browser on iOS? Google Maps / Apple Maps? ZUIs are one of the main multi-touch user interface paradigms now.

I think (work)spaces like macOS Spaces because they make access easier; with a single continuous space you have to work, whereas a workspace is a hotkey away. They make for nice demos and movie scenes though.

After having used such things since the 80s (starting with DESQview) I find myself simply minimizing or leaving secondary applications in the background of a single workspace. When I do use other spaces it is for full screen view. I don't usually need to see multiple windows at the same time, but that would be a task for a tiling manager...