I use tabbed layout for grouping some things in i3/sway/hyprland like chat apps. It works well but those are things I just open once and don't think about again. Terminals are opened and closed constantly and I don't want to have to think about, or fix, new window positioning. A new tab in the existing window is going to be exactly where I expect it to be and have no impact on the positioning of any other window.
Real browser tabs I like because if something ends up becoming a new main focus, I drag it to its own window and now it becomes its own workspace with its satellites tacked onto the window as tabs. I can close/re-open them pretty fast with browser history, and it becomes very easy for me to quickly jump in/out of mental work spaces.
However, what I cannot stand are non-browser native tabs that are becoming (?) standard in most web apps. It is very restricting in my opinion and defeats the point of tabs, and instead ends up cluttering the space far too much. The big CRMs are a perfect example of this as it slows down everything so much for me as everything is trapped in a single window, it's very difficult to isolate or preserve tabs, and you lose access to the history.
Terminal on MacOS introduced tabs some time ago and the paradigm still doesn't sit right with me. More or less it's unobtrusive enough (and I enjoy that Apple at least preserves certain accessibility options while shuffling tabs around), but I just can't quite get to the same head-space with Terminal as I can with browsers, probably because CLI is much more concise by nature and has some already pretty good systems in place for multitasking from a single window.
Different hierarchical levels that I can use differently to organise stuff in my mental model:
- Desktops/workspaces: completely different projects.
- Windows: different tasks within a project.
- Tabs: different documents/sessions needed for a single task.