musca

musca is an X window manager that does something like this, where the tiling layout and windows are decoupled. github.com/enticeing/musca

I used to love GOOMWWM[1] and used it for the longest time. I miss a lot of things about it, still. It doesn't quite meet your requirements, looks-wise its very minimal and it doesn't have snapping, but I really liked the idea behind it: make a keyboard-centric stacking/floating window manager that gives you enough control that it can be used as if it were a (manual[2]) tiling window manager. It really feels like a tiling window manager and its fantastic! [1] https://github.com/seanpringle/goomwwm [2] I personally use sway these days, but I still prefer manual tiling where I move and size windows myself, rather than having the WM try to do it for me, as long as the WM makes it very easy to do, as goomwwm did (and its predecessor, musca: https://github.com/enticeing/musca)

I came to filing window managers through musca[1] and then goomwwm[2] (Get Out Of My Way Window Manager) and then switched to i3 (and more recently, away) because both Musca and goomwwm haven’t been updated in years. I still miss Musca and goomwwm. They didn’t require any visualisation of the hierarchy, things were just layer out next to each other without a hierarchy and just worked. It was very intuitive. Goomwwm went a step further: it’s not technically a tiling window manager at all, but rather a floating window manager (so you can have your windows overlap if you want) that happens to be usable as if it were tiling and that’s keyboard centric (but you can use mouse too if you wish). That really was the sweet spot for me and I often find annoying behaviour in i3/sway that goomwwm didn’t have (typically around movement and resizing). I