A tiled layout is good for the work you’re doing right now. Keep an app beside its terminal and give both enough room to read. Cherrytop’s infinite canvas sits underneath that layout, with space to arrange work you want to come back to.
Give the work a place
Pan away from the current windows and you can make another area for a different task. Group related items in a frame or give that area a name. When you zoom out, the arrangement helps you recognize where to return. The GUI article follows the move from tiled panes to the canvas and back.
A canvas can hold live terminals and app widgets. That makes a space useful as a view of work in progress. The running terminal still belongs to its workspace. Putting a view of it on the canvas leaves the underlying run where it was.
Some work stays open
Consider an app with a page you’re trying to fix. Tile its preview beside the terminal that runs it. Keep an earlier version or a note about the bug in a separate part of the canvas. You can work with the immediate pair in front of you, then move out to the other material when you need to compare.
That arrangement is useful because the pieces have different lifetimes. A terminal can keep running while you look elsewhere. A widget can show a read-only view of app data. A window can hold a view you need briefly. Grouping them in a space gives you a way back to that combination without asking those tools to share a lifecycle.
There’s a tradeoff. A large canvas makes it easy to put something down and forget where you left it. Named spaces and recognizable groups give the view landmarks. A useful tour of Cherrytop should show someone leaving a working arrangement and returning to it, so the viewer can judge whether those landmarks help.
There are two kinds of persistence here. A named space gives an arrangement a place you can return to. A terminal shown inside it has its own lifetime on the host. Returning to a space lets you find the terminal again. Sakura attaches to its running session when the host still has it available.
A place a peer can visit
Make a space for a collaborator with the app in view, a terminal they have permission to open and a note about what needs attention. The spatial arrangement gives them somewhere to begin. Which things they can see or use still depends on the access you grant.
Open a place shared by a paired peer and use the views the host offers. A preview can open as a web app. A live terminal attaches through Sakura, which starts with a snapshot and follows the same run’s output. A grant can allow viewing without granting input.
Follow the route between shared places in Traverse the Network, alongside Cellar Door’s terminal worlds.