On The Talk Show 452, “A Scam Held Together with Patriotism and Golden Paint”, John Gruber said:
One of the things that, to me, just defines a Mac app is being able to open whatever the element of the app is, you should be able to open that into a window on its own.
He complained that, for example, in ChatGPT Classic (née ChatGPT), there’s no way to open a thread in its own window.
Weirdly, the new ChatGPT app (née Codex) has a context menu option to do this, and it even sounds like it should do it (“Open in new window” should open the thing under the cursor in a new window, right?), but it doesn’t do what you think it does. It opens a new complete window, identical to the main window—all your chats, projects, threads, the whole UI.1
I use this feature somewhat often because of the stupid way the new app’s sidebar displays chats, threads, Codex projects, and ChatGPT projects, all sort of jumbled up.
But it would obviously be better if you could open a thread (or, my preference, a whole project, like BBEdit) in its own window without getting the whole UI. Maybe they could use one of these AI coding assistants to help them.
UPDATE: apparently “Open in new window” is only an option for Codex projects, not ChatGPT projects or threads.
Curioser and curioser.
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I think this is actually a Windows-ism; it’s fairly common over there to be able to open multiple copies of the same app, which is kind of what Codex is doing here, just inside a single instance. ↩︎
