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I don't have any results for Windows or macOS yet unfortunately. I wanted to run these tests on Windows eventually, and include things like cmd.exe and the Windows Terminal. Maybe when I get around to re-benchmarking a wider range of terminals. Mac would certainly be interesting to include, but I don't have access to any of those.
You could fullscreen them, yeah. Just for gitui on my monitor, I find that 67% is both sufficient and enough, and keeping a little bit of the other window in sight helps maintain spatial context.
Besides, when it's something like runtime logs in a terminal, I sometimes keep the terminal maximized (to avoid line wrapping), but only leave it peeking out, so that I can switch to it if I notice something strange in the left side of the output.
Have you seen PaperWM [1]? It runs on top of GNOME as an extension, so you get all the benefits of a fully fledged and supported DE, and it is quite a well done implementation. I've been using it for a few months now, works very good.
Alt+Tab is in most-recently-used order, whereas with scrolling it's a spatial kind of system.
since it reintroduces the mouse as a core aspect of window navigation
Not really, why? You switch between windows with binds, just like in a regular tiling WM. Mod+Left/Right (H/L) goes to the window to the left/right, etc.
As an example, I usually keep my code editor maximized, with a 67% gitui terminal to the left and a 67% "compile & run" terminal to the right. This way nothing is too small.
And then I use workspaces for different groups of windows, i.e. messaging apps, the browser, and different projects all go on different workspaces.
I personally find it better because, unlike regular tiling, you're not constrained to the screen size. I.e. if a 50% window width is too small, I can tile together several 67% or even 100% wide windows, and just scroll between them.
I will describe how PaperWM works; I think that behavior makes a lot of sense.
There are preset widths (by default: ~33%, 50%, ~67%) which you can toggle between with a key, plus a 100% "maximized" width that you can toggle separately. This works out pretty well from my experience and gives you the convenient 33/67 and 50/50 layouts (or 33/33/33 on ultrawides).
The initial window width is what the window wants. So the window is free to use any size on creation, then PaperWM expands it to full height with the same width that the window had selected.
Whenever I tried streaming coding on Twitch I found myself being much less productive than normally due to constantly having to pay attention to the chat and whatnot. Actually for me even having something like a chat open without paying attention seems to significantly decrease the productivity, it's as if a constant part of my brain gets dedicated to the potential viewers regardless of whether it's being currently occupied by the said viewers.
A text editor using 600 MB of RAM to open a file is ridiculous. That with a couple of Chrome tabs grinds my laptop to a halt.