Give me keybindings or give me death!
My quest for saner window management began with the Terminator terminal emulator. I really dug the window splits and quick pane navigation, but it lacked persistent sessions, and I never got around to figuring out how to script it. (Also it crashed a lot at the time.)
I moved on to Tmux for my terminal pane management woes, and I could see why it was popular, but my god, the default binding are terrible. I wound up mapping them all to what I was using in Terminator previously.
After that I was turned on to the fantastic Byobu Tmux wrapper by my buddy Brian, and was an instant convert. Persistant sessions, great quick bindings for window splits and resizing, and a tabbed view of multiple screens to boot.
Fast forward about six months after a really sweet contract, and one 55 inch 4k resolution monitor later, and I had been completely won over by i3, the tiling window manager.
This turned out to be the biggest turning point in my workflow evolution.
With i3, I was able to get all of the rich window splits of my glory days on Terminator, quick panel switching, and have the benefit of this metaphor on the level of my window manager.
As they say, holy crap.
In a single fell swoop, two disperate sets of keybindings, one for my terminal, and one for my window manager merged into one, for a concise single easy to remeber schema.
That is the zen of hacking your meta-cognition.