Exactly my experience. This is the killer feature for me. It helps to not break flow while working on a given task. Also, it’s great that the floating pane is per tab as well so those related background/interactive tasks can be context dependent.

I don’t see what benefit floating windows bring to Tmux workflows.

If I want to run something in background, I just Cmd+number to another window and run it there. Thanks to multiple panes & windows, I can have N things running “in background”, it takes a millisecond to switch to any of them, and I guess if I bother I could even have window tab title reflect the status of the process.

I’ve seen floating windows in Neovim, but I see only one use for them: expanded LSP error messages. Otherwise, I use floaters when they come plugin’s config, but they are more of a nuisance and are tricky to manage without resorting to pointer device.

I was using a similar workflow before switching to Zellij.

The benefit is that you can only use one window for every project instead of 2 or more.

What I usually do is have Vim take up the entire window and use floating terminals for background stuff which can be brought in and out of view with a hot key.

The floating terminals are stacked by default, but they can also be arranged side by side if needed.

I won't claim it to be a huge game-changer for productivity, but its definitely a nicer workflow for me.

Interesting. Tmux also has pane zooming feature (where it will take the entire window until you switch it off) & window/pane browser (prefix + B, I think). They seem to achieve something similar, though I rarely see a need for it.

I keep different Tmux instances for different projects so I get up to 9 windows per project with no overhead.

Zellij has that too. I rarely use that though.

What I'm talking about is this: https://imgur.com/lUvhjJe

The 3 floating windows above a Vim instance

That is an anti-feature for me, as I don’t see immediately how to switch to the one I need through keyboard, without clicking it. There must be a quick switch of some sort?

Yes of course, you can use keyboard to do everything in Zellij. One thing that eased my transition was the addition of (customizable) Tmux keybindings so that muscle memory was retained.

So what’s your shortcut to immediately switch to the chrome-dev floater, for example?

I don't really get why you would bring a floating terminal into your "main coding screen" to do something in the background. What problem does it solve compared to just switching to another window, running the command, and and switching back?

Also in tmux you can just attach a existing window as a split to your current window and then pop it out again using aliases/bindings.

How is this different from tmux popups though? I think I have the exact same workflow in tmux

tmux popups are not first class citizens (eg. at least in current versions they freeze the display behind them, opening a terminal inside one of them is a pain as well as opening multiple ones, not to mention resizing them or rearranging them intelligently)