I do that, not in a real "tiling window manager" but something very close: openbox, set to show no titlebars, and using shortcuts to title the windows to precise positions. I have 3 position: most of my screen on the left, a small vertical slice on the right, a smaller chunk underneath. If I want a titlebar for some application, I have a shortcut that will give the window a titlebar, and then I can move it around with the mouse if I want to. So I get the best of both worlds.

Surprise - I don't run tmux. It is simpler to have several roxterm, in these position, with various tabs open. When I work remotely, I use screen on the remote host, but that's all.

To give you an idea of my shortcuts, in a real life scenario ; my caps lock is remapped to control or escape with xcape:

- esc: pop a new roxterm and from wherever I am, bring me to the terminal desktop

- f9: resize this roxterm to the left part of the screen

- esc: pop another roxterm, focus it

- ctrl-f9: resize it to the right vertical slice of the screen

- f4: switch to the browser desktop

- f12: put by browser in full screen, to check some reference without distraction

- f5: switch back to the terminals desktop

- alt-tab: switch to the roxterm that's currently on the right

- f12: make this roxterm full screen to do something without distraction for a while

- f12: demaximize and put back this roxterm where it was

- f9: now move this roxterm to the left, over the other one

- alt-tab: move to the other roxterm that was on the left

- ctrl-f9: put this roxterm in the vertical slice position on the right

- ctrl-space: make this roxterm sticky, showing on all desktop

- f4: move back to the internet desktop to check more documentation

- f9: resize the browser to be on the left part of the screen, so that I can see both the browser and the roxterm

- f5: move back to the terminal desktop. The space occupied by the browser will be replaced by the roxterm I left there, on the left

- alt-tab: move focus to this roxterm

- ctrl-t: open a new tab in this roxterm

- ctrl-v : paste some stuff from the internet browser

(etc..)

I have accomplished all that with about 20 keystrokes, from muscle memory. When I connect my extra wide screen, f10 and f11 have similar windows resizing function as f9 do on the laptop screen. f1 to f8 take me to desktop dedicated to some use or another (f7 is the windows desktop, with visual studio, f6 is the rstudio desktop, etc)

One think I positively hated until recently: copy and paste. Muscle memory means ctrl-shift-c in one application and ctrl-c in another didn't work. So in the terminal, I remapped the sigint signals to ctrl-x with stty. Hitting ctrl-x is just as convenient as ctrl-c and now I can copy paste as needed. ctrl-v to enter verbatim sequences is done with ctrl-q, just like in vim. so ctrl-c and ctrl-v work everywhere.

When I catch myself wanting to use the x copy paste buffer, the middle click is not so hard: on a thinkpad keyboard, it is right below the space key. But I just prefer ctrl-v. The luxury of having 2 independant copy-paste buffers is appreciable for some tasks however :)

Anyway, sorry for the long reply. I just don't have a lot of opportunities to talk about my setup. I am some kind of an optimization freak, I know it. But I don't want an interface to bother me. I have been using that for the last 3 or 4 years after giving up on OSX, and it has one great quality: I don't have to think about it. It just work the way I want. YMMV of course.