I built a 2D canvas to escape tab chaos — and it became a product
What happens if you put work into the second dimension?
Context switching is exhausting, especially with agentic coding. The author built a prototype 2D canvas where real terminals, apps, and browsers sit side by side, grouping work by project instead of type. The tool, Campus, became a full product at FlutterFlow. It's free for macOS. The post explores spatial memory, multiplayer, and why it beats Miro.
You don’t paste your work into Campus, you put your work in Campus.
- jexe
Cofounder of a now-defunct multiplayer, real-time infinite canvas project here (Here.fm)
We could not for the life of us figure out how to make this a meaningful productivity tool. Yes, we had meetings here, and yes, drawing all over someone else's screenshare was actually useful - And building islands of data was an interesting mental model. It descended into messy chaos no matter what you did, and anything you would do to try and combat that undid some of the benefits of the canvas to begin with.
It was a lot of fun to hang out in as a multiplayer live video room, though, so we leaned into that with (relatively) more success.
- projektfu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface
They mostly do not gain a lot of users. Good luck!
- condiment
Very cool interface and reminiscent of figma/excalidraw in the way they provide an infinite 2d canvas for shapes and figures. Most tools of these types tend to implement layers as well, which might be loosely analogous to multiple desktops and could be a neat interface element to explore. The impetus for layering in a drawing tool is very different from the impetus for doing such in a desktop windowing tool.
The 3d demos are similar to what you experience when using a VR headset with desktop emulation software. I ran experiments with that for several months and while the concepts were interesting, context switching in a simulated physical space was actually a lot slower than alt+tabbing between things.
- amelius
What happens if you put all your browser tabs in two dimensions?
Answer: you get a mess.
That's why browsers weren't built like that, and also why I think this will not work.
But happy to be proven wrong of course.
- TrackerFF
Back in 2013 or 2014 when the first Oculus dev kit came out, the first thing a colleague of mine coded up was his own "virtual" workplace. By trade he was a graphics game dev that had been working on FPS games, but changed fields to more traditional tech work.
He made his own virtual 3D office where he could whip up new screens whenever and wherever needed, IIRC, these computers in the virtual world were virtual machines with some very bare bones Linux distros. He argued that it was a very good replacement for having to buy and mount new physical monitors.
Can't remember how long he actually used that solution, but it did look cool.