Same. My normal set up is having a shell window with 4 tabs:
1. Text editing
2. Command Line
3. Program logs
4. Code console
Flipping through them is a breeze, and I never have to leave Terminal. The displays are always simple, straight forward, and focused. No distractions. I'm able to just get in the zone with the code and forget anything else exists.
If you can move your tabs to tmux, you will greatly improve your situation. It's easy.
Then you can, for instance, make your development machine a dedicated cloud server, like digital Ocean etc.
This is what I do and it's very nice to be able to use any hardware I want, including cheap underpowered stuff, since it's just a window to my real machine.
I use tmux to group shells by context, setting a shell variable that various things in my bashrc respond to. The biggest win is a separate bash history per context, so my commands related to project A don't get mixed up with my commands related to project B or my sysadmin commands or ...
What language(s) do you develop in though. I found this was fine for certain languages, but others such as C#, swift or perhaps Java really suit having a fat IDE. Or perhaps its me?
I also use a digitalocean droplet for my development, but I'm programming in Python, bash, JavaScript/HTML/CSS, PHP, MySQL. I wouldn't do this if I were using Java, Java without an IDE is painful.
