Nobody's stopping you from segmenting one big monitor into different regions; and you get to choose how big those regions are from day to day rather than being forced into it.
They tend to be relatively poorly handled by the software, at least out of the box.
Every modern major OS now has some level of tiling/splitting on a monitor's edges baked into their window manager by default now. Some can be tweaked to split into smaller subgroups, but that often requires less well tested/polished options (some apps just ignore the hints), or even third party extensions.
That's too much extra work. With multiple monitors you can maximize primary apps while still having manual management of smaller supporting apps on another monitor. You also get more edges for rapid snap to the sides of a monitor.
Since you seem to know about the best window managers, can you recommend one for MacOS which will let me direct focus to whichever window is left/right/down/up of the currently selected one? i3/sway does this just fine, but my impression is that MacOS's api doesn't allow third party developers to pull it off, but I'd love to be wrong about that.
Not the person you were asking, but after years of using i3, AeroSpace is the only way I can use a Mac productively, and does indeed have the feature you're describing.
Wow. Thanks for this. I've bounced off a number of tiling WMs on MacOS over the years - Amethyst, Yabai, others I can't remember - but Aerospace is really excellent. Can't believe I've never heard of it before. Love the custom implementation of spaces as a solution to what ails a number of other tiling WMs. I installed it this morning and disabled the mish-mash of Rectangle Pro, Better Touch Tool and OS kb shortcuts I'd been using.
it has quirks and limitations, some of which can be fixed by disabling system integrity protection but it can definitely handle window tiling and navigating with keybindings when you use the companion daemon https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd
I use yabai which does what you say and more pretty well. It also lets you completely remove spaces transition effect but this will require disabling of SIP.
Although if that big monitor is an OLED, segmenting it into halves or quarters is kind of begging to end up with a line burned in down or across the middle eventually.
Samsung solves this in the TV itself. It can be annoying when the edges of the screen are ever so slightly off, but i'm glad I don't have to worry about it. QCQ90S. I wouldn't recommend it since the tv's gui is glacially slow, but then again all the ones I tried last year were.
I have done this in the past using a tilling window manager and it's still better to use different displays. There is something about our monkey brains that makes 'different physical object = do different things' work better than all having it on the same monitor.
I did get it to work for me with thick black bars between the screens, but when you're giving up an inch of screen real estate for every virtual monitor then you might as well get physical ones.
