John Siracusa has made me go more in on multiple windows than I have since the advent of tabs.
Recently, I have ever so slightly started breaking web browser tabs epecially out into windows based on topic. There is something nice about not having everything mixed into one window, whether it is web pages or code projects - or markdown documents for that matter. One of the advantages is that cleaning up feels easier and more satisfying - I can work through and close whole windows rather than just make small changes to a very long tab bar.
I work a little bit with placing different windows in different locations, but so far it has not been enough to really use spatial memory to locate things. When I work with multiple windows at once, I tend to arrange them so that they do not overlap completely, providing visual spots to click for switching between them. I may have increased my amount of pointing and clicking for window switching a bit (over command tabbing and the like), but that could well be imaginary.
Management mysteries
Window management remains one huge question mark. If anything, using more windows has made me more uncertain of what tools - if any - I would like to help manage my windows. I have been using Moom for a long time for some basic window placement shortcuts, but I recently went in and disabled almost all functionality except the floating panel you get by hovering the green maximize button. I triggered my keyboard shortcuts by accident, and I almost never want to place my windows over the large sections of the screen Moom can provide when you drag windows toward screen edges. Things feel calmer this way, and I think less tools may help me discover what I actually want. I have a feeling that any tool which could actually help me would be too complex and fiddly to actually be useful. That is, large and general placements like what Moom can provide feel too imprecise, but the actual thing I want to do in a given situation also feels so specific that I have a hard time seeing a pattern that I could use some tool to automate.
There could be some kind of activity-related pattern, kind of what Stage manager provides but more flexible. That is, whatever I do usually involves a group of windows, and I think the placement I want usually revolves around placing those windows in relation to each other. When editing podcasts, I want the widest window I can get for the editing, a non-overlapping window for adding and editing show notes, and also a browser window for looking links up. When finishing show notes after editing, the need is usually a browser window and the show notes side by side. When developing at work, I would ideally have my code, the browser window, and the browser developer tools all equally large, equally in the middle of my field of view, and all visible at once without overlap. Since that is not completely possible, I usually have the browser and its developer tools in roughly equal-size windows side by side, and the code editor in the centre of the screen taller than the browser windows so that all three are always visible and clickable even if they are not on top at any given moment.
And these are just the main windows. Reference browsing, communications, and other activities need to go somewhere as well (usually on secondary screens, when available).
And, how would I like to switch between groups and activities? Is there any kind of pattern in that? Is there something smart I could be doing to handle my increasingly common situation of having multiple windows in one app which belong to different activities? It is easy to write that I would like more fine-grained control over when and how to bring one app window forward, and when to bring all an app's windows forward, but it is a whole different thing to figure out how I would actually like that to work (and in which situations I would like it to happen). Front and center can only help with a part of this - when I click windows, not when I command-tab and the like - and has thus also fallen out of my toolbox after a rather long period of experimentation.
No, minimizing is not for me.
So many interesting questions!