> I would argue that the idea that windows are ephemeral doesn't work for all windows in all situations - I'm almost always going to want a window with BBEdit, another with Terminal cd'd to the current project (whatever I might be doing, and there likely will be a fair number of these, more than 1 at least), plus a web browser with email/documentation.
I thought so, too. However, turns out I work better when I see either an editor window, a terminal window, or a web browser, but not all at the same time. Meaning even if I had them all on screen, every moment in time I really focus only on one, and I do it for minutes at a time—all others meanwhile are visual junk. So SM does just that: focus one window at a time by default, and because command-tab is so readily available switching between full focus on one window to full focus on another window is very fast.
In my case, I could create a multi-window set where I have all of those windows very large and exactly same size (e.g., with Rectangle’s “almost full-screen” feature), and then I would get a bonus way of switching just between those windows (through command-`). I might try it some time.
There are few cases so far where I create multi-window sets arranged so that I see windows simultaneously, for example: 1) when I need to drag things between them repeatedly, such as when organizing files (e.g., moving photography between my SD card, SSD and HDD), or 2) when I’m observing multiple long-running processes in terminal but didn’t bother to run Tmux in the beginning so now I am stuck multiple Terminal windows and I want to see progress in them all. Turns out such cases are pretty rare.
That said, I don’t use multiple displays, I work on laptop and that probably informs my use case.
