I am a new blender user, dropped in on 2.8, and never really used 2.7x (I’ve used Max and Maya for decades), and I was curious what the difference between “New Window” vs “New Main Window” was, and they both seem to do the same thing (and neither is exactly what I want). I’d like to open a new window with only one interface area (IE, UV editor or other node editor) to have has a floating editor I can throw in the second monitor when I don’t need it. " Duplicate Area into new Window" seems to do what I want, but it’s only possible to do from a 3D viewport “view” menu. Is there another way to access that functionality, and what is the difference between New Window and New Main Window.
OK, so the shortcut for " Duplicate Area into new Window" is to Shift Left click in the right corner of a window. so that’s cool, I will use that. But I’d still like to understand the difference between “New Window”, “New Main Window” and “Duplicate Area into New Window”, and the logic behind them.
“New Window” creates a child window with synchronized scene, view layer and workspace layouts as the main.
“New Main Window” creates a new parent window with its own access to scene, view layer and workspace layouts. It’s basically a second blender process with an independent view into the same blend file.
I would reckon the ability to work on the same blend file. I personally never had much use of this feature since most of my work has been focused doing one thing at a time.
But it does give you the ability to work with multiple scenes and view layers on the same file, so you could for eg. do sculpting on one object and be in edit mesh mode on another.