1) Most of the default config works well out-of-the-box, and you can tweak away things to your liking. Documentation is short and to-the-point.
2) It's possible to start processes and put windows where they belong at startup, using an extra layout manager. You later can tweak the setup by manual keystrokes according to extra needs and there's always extra workspaces you can move to.
3) By splitting parent container from child container, you can keep a fractal hierarchy of containers for putting/moving windows in. This can be managed by keystrokes according to need, and makes it easy to tab/stack/split windows or change part of workspace layout manually, without windows unexpectedly jumping around too much. Most guides fail to show the advantages of this, and is something most tiling WMs lack or implement poorly. Again you get this by default.
It's the most common set up in development in the world, I'd argue.
> I can't imagine myself going back to pointing and clicking here and there with one hand on the mouse most of the time.
Just run your Linux flavour in a VM and use i3 in there.
I do all of my DevOps related work (Python, Go, Terraform, Ansible, YAML, etc.) in a Ubuntu VM just using the default window manager (can't be bothered to change it.)
It's not hard to have your cake and eat it too, in this problem domain :-)
happy to show you my set up if you want to jump on Discord? https://discord.gg/MTzBvSS
No matter what terminal emulator I used, there was too much lag compared to the real thing. I couldn't use kitty/alacritty since there was no hardware accleration. When I'm looking through code in (neo)vim, I normally fold everything and then scroll by holding j/k. I set my repeat delay very low, and my repeat rate extremly high so that I can just quickly scroll through code. This was completely unusuable in a VM. I had to switch to ctrl+f/b/d/u and it drove me nuts.
Maybe there was some way to get better hardware accleration, if I had two graphics card, maybe I could have devoted one to the VM and gotten better performance. Or maybe virtualbox is bad vs vmware or whatever else is out there.
I'm sure if I had to use it long term, I could come up with some usable workflow, but I still think using it natively is a significantly better experience.
I often do things this way. SSH from whatever I'm holding to a more powerful machine with my tools and configs. Then the terminal is on your host, at least.
I've also RDPed into local Windows VMs to get a better experience like working copy/paste. That's the approach Hyper-V took with their enhanced session mode
It's been fine for me. I'm not that overly sensitive to millisecond delays in rendering or response times, so it works out fine.
Ryzen 3 9600X, 32GB of RAM, nVidia RTX 2080 Super on a 49" G9 Ultrawide, for reference.