What a tiling WM does in this situation is remove the part of the equation where you have to think about maximizing your windows. Instead of mouse interactions with GUI controls for window placement and scaling, you just use a couple of hotkeys to cycle between window layouts and navigate workspaces (i.e., if you want side-by-side windows for a moment during some task, you hit a key once or twice, then do the same to get back to maximized windows). This may not seem like it's much cognitive load to get rid of, but for me at least, going back after a few months of having the WM just handle things felt clumsy and primitive.
It will also ruin you for using most standard desktop environments, and I personally burn probably a solid day a year porting my WM config to some new environment. These have been a worthwhile trade-offs for me, but probably something to consider if you have to use systems you don't control very often.
It's more of a shortcut-driven automanagement of windows. When I see people in "normal" windowing environments work, the workflow goes: open an app, drag it to the correct monitor and corner of that monitor, and then optionally manually resize it. Bonus points for taking a few seconds to fish for the exact edge of the window's frame when resizing. Or misclicking when aiming for the title bar and opening a menu instead or hiding the window because you clicked on some other window it was hovering over.
Tiling window managers: open application, and the window manager puts it in a sensible position most of the time. Use shortcuts to quickly correct its placement, if necessary. Typically shortcuts are something like
- switch to master pane (the biggest pane on the screen)
In terms of a command line metaphor, it is the keyboard shortcuts for accessing history or editing the text of a command. It is not a command line in the sense of options to grep.
But what it is most like (switching to simile) is Emacs window manager...by which I mean that Emacs uses a tiling window manager.
I'd say it's more like a terminal multiplexer for window management, if you're familiar with screen or tmux. (Using XMonad for windows and using tmux for collections of shells / terminal apps have followed similar tracks in my life.)
It will also ruin you for using most standard desktop environments, and I personally burn probably a solid day a year porting my WM config to some new environment. These have been a worthwhile trade-offs for me, but probably something to consider if you have to use systems you don't control very often.