What I want is a way to take any view I please, from any application, and arrange it anywhere in a standard way with keyboard support and sensible omissions of chrome. If this means 65% of my screen is terminals, 20% web browsers, 10% some graphical view from Xcode and 5% notifications, that should be perfect fine. Instead, the most the Mac has been able to cobble together is a simple split screen view and that is only for Full Screen.

And, we also have: Xcode with its own completely custom and quirky pane/tab management scheme, terminals with their own pane/tab scheme, browsers with their own tabs, etc. Individual applications continue to feel some need to over-engineer their own pane/window management to compensate for lack of system support.

There are some signs of hope though. The direction Apple is going with Mac view controllers could theoretically put them in a position to finally turn individual views into first-class citizens that would be feasible to interleave arbitrarily across applications. At that point, command-line tools could integrate very nicely in arbitrary ways with elements that really benefit from being graphical. We’ll see.