I’ve tinkered with pixel art now and then but I’m far from skilled. This may sound silly, but the idea of having two windows one zoomed and one unzoomed has never occurred to me, and I feel like it's going to change a lot for me.
The original MacPaint had "Fatbits" which allowed zooming in to edit specific pixels: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/archive/staff... I think it's the first time that was implemented in a graphics program. It was really the killer feature of MacPaint. (Which itself was the killer app for the original Mac in 1984.)
Seems like this may have been common in vintage image editing software. Arbitrary zoom doesn't seem to have been available in most raster graphics editing software until some point in the mid-to-late 90s. I've seen a couple programs that compensated for this with a dual-view arrangement where you could move the zoomed-in view around by dragging a box around inside the zoomed-out view.
IIRC, the classic Deluxe Paint II (mostly for Amiga, but also PC) had this as a standard feature when zooming. Classic graphics work was almost all pixel editing.
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