Overlay Windows

[Charlie-83]

This is a feature from kitty: kitty docs

(I am defining window as: a rectangle that contains a terminal. So this could be a tab with no splits or split within a tab)

An overlay window is a window that appears on top of another and covers it. I like to think of it as adding a third dimension to your layout; splits allow you to have multiple terminals in the horizontal and vertical directions while overlays allow you to stack terminals into/out of the screen.

In kitty, I have created a kitten (plugin) which allows me to create overlay windows for a particular split and then cycle between them. After switching, it shows a big ascii N/M on screen for half a second so I can see which window in the stack I am looking at (N) and how many are in the stack (M). This is actually achieved with another overlay window.

overlay-windows.mp4

This "third dimension" of split layout is a pretty key part of my workflow and is a bit of a requirement for me to fully switch to ghostty.

I am interested in how this would best be implemented in ghostty. Could ghostty simply provide new_split:stack and goto_split:forwards/goto_split:backwards commands to natively support this third dimension use case. Or could ghostty just provide the ability to create overlay windows and leave the rest of the implementation to the user (like kitty). Or something even lower level?