My primary window-organization tools are: i3 virtual desktops, web-browser, emacs, and tmux. i3 virtual desktops are named by task/workflow: I have one desktop for project management, one for emacs, one for terminals for one project, one for terminals for another project, one for work-related communication, and one for personal communication. Emacs does its thing and makes great use of it, but its spectacular profusion of buffers and its insane customization never pollutes the rest of my WM because it's contained within emacs. The browser desktops group related tabs, but they go one further and let me put tabs side-by-side without multiple windows of project management polluting my global window list. And so on and so forth.
Allowing each tool to specialize information management for its particular use case gives me much better performance overall. It's definitely specialized and idiosyncractic; I would not want to make everyone deal with it. But for me, doing this 8+ hours a day: every time I'm forced to work without that hierarchy and that specialization, I can tell you that the effort is worth it.
I've decided to only use a tiling WM for all window/pane management, and stop using anything else, as much as possible.
So I abandoned Gnome3->Terminator->tmux in favor of bspwm->urxvt. I don't lose the functionality that I had before (tiling terminals), and I'm using much lighter-weight tools and less of them. I love it.
Oh, and as for editor tiling... Yeah, I still have to tile buffers in Vim/Emacs, but only because I prefer the editing workflow in that case (all my context / session / environment remains the same). I suppose I could have lightweight clients, but I haven't really looked into it.
I did try this for urxvt and it was quite efficient. No idea whether it will run well with hundreds of e.g. emacs buffers.
At least, with GridSelect [1] the selection mechanism scales well to hundreds of items.
[1] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/xmonad-contrib-0.13/docs...
It doesn't solve frames in Emacs, or tmux/screen per se, but for tmux at least iTerm2 on OS X shows that doing a terminal emulator that integrates with it certainly is possible. For my part, my screen usage is very strictly "full screen" (or full terminal, I guess) so it flows relatively smoothly.
Sometimes it is annoying - splitting emacs frame and resizing it the same way as my tiles would be nice. Other times it is nice to be able to treat them on two separate levels. I'm not sure doing entirely away with the two level nature of that would be ideal.
Only issue I am having is sorting of opened web pages. If you using only few web pages per virtual desktop it can be useful. With tabs in chrome you can move whole chrome to another tile or desktop. But if you have 20 qutebrowser windows it takes to long.
I personally like the current situation because I can group related work.
Most tiling WM's are essentially 'tree style tabs' but for all windows. You organize tiles and children of a tree, in i3 you can also set tiles to stack so you get a tab-like appearance to a tree.
Huh? How is this any different in other operating systems?
It is interesting to imagine alternative universe where we instead would have advanced enough OS level window management that would allow deeper integration to underlying applications. E.g. something like OS level tree style tab -like window-management might be neat, especially if combined with powerful tiling management.