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Yes but what do you do when you briefly need to look at your browser and your terminal at the same time? Say when you are following instructions.

Again using parent's example of AwesomeWM: You'll temporary move one of the "windows" to the same "screen" as the other one (via "tagging"), resetting everything once you're done. Usually this is like 2 or 3 shortcuts all together.

AwesomeWM uses a tag system for windows, so you assign windows to one or more tags, then you can freely view one or many tags at the same time, compared to the traditional "workspaces" approach that for example Gnome and macOS has.

Use a keyboard shortcut to switch to a tiling layout? Or if you're psychotic, like I am, activate your Quake-style semi-transparent terminal that overlays the desktop, allowing you to (barely) read the superimposed instructions in the browser window below.

IMO, tiled Quake-style overlay terminals (guake, yakuake, iTerm hotkey window) over floating windows offer the best of both worlds.

And then there's me with 12 terminals opened across 7 tags for running random ls command. I also have a nice collection of 10-12 firefox windows with dozens of tabs. My tendency to open many many windows has sky-rocketed, thanks awesome !
> what do you do when you briefly need to look at your browser and your terminal at the same time?

I'm surprised anyone would want a non-tiled window for this. I'm always annoyed at having to manually drag the windows to a corner each when following instructions on systems not my own.

Open a scratch pad or move the browser to the first workspace temporarily. Rarely will I ever have more than one or two windows open per workspace. It's not intuitive when you aren't used to it, but it feels really good after you have configured things to work to your liking. Maybe I'll blog about it so I can describe it better.
> Open a scratch pad or move the browser to the first workspace temporarily.

Both are more painful than a simple keystroke. And you can immediately go back to the same window configuration you were at after you've done the copying.

> Rarely will I ever have more than one or two windows open per workspace.

Same here. I have some workflows where I need 3 windows. The times I need more occur once every so many months.

Reading all the comments on this submission, I don't understand why people are associating tiling WMs with "many windows on the same virtual desktop". Tiling WMs also have virtual desktops. I personally like that I don't have to manually maximize anything any more. What I'm really grateful for is not having to manually move/resize/switch windows around when one is overlapping the other. It's very painful when I have to use a system that isn't a tiling WM.

I realize I was really vague in my original comment, I currently use Hyprland, I also have River and Sway that I play around in for fun. I love it.

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