I hate spending any unnecessary clicks or keyboard shortcuts on getting whats out of my head into the computer. I used yabai before primarily, now using aerospace. Since the monitor is super ultra-wide (57 inches with a very high DPI) the native resolution makes everything ultra small to my eyes. It's the same height as my 34-inch Samsung G5s which are 1440 pixels tall natively, but since this one is 2160, it would have to be 1.5 times larger physically to look decent at native res especially on macOS. The only other option is to scale the UI 1.5x which is where all the problems begin.

I like the three-column separate monitor layout because I have hotkeys, primarily driven by my mouse but also usable keyboard-only where I can easily switch between monitors with `⌘+`` which moves my cursor between them. I can select whichever monitor I want and put my mouse to it, and I can switch to any workspace on any monitor quickly. I also have hotkeys that sync three workspace numbers across monitors, so switching between them switches all AeroSpace workspaces on all three monitors simultaneously. If I have five projects going, I'd have the terminal on the left, Linear and other communication tools on the right in accordion mode with AeroSpace, and I can use my mouse or keyboard exclusively to find exactly what I'm looking for almost as fast as I think of it. I spend zero time on window management or organization now so it makes it thoughtless to use.

If I'm just using the monitor's native resolution there's no real way to do portals — having two apps open as sticky and only switching a portion of the monitor space to a different app while keeping the other sticky. There are hacks you can do with AeroSpace, especially since AeroSpace doesn't use native macOS Spaces, but the three-monitor layout is a much more robust approach in my opinion just a bit of a nightmare to setup. Theres a million little mac annoyances you have to fix.