What are you talking about? Emacs has incredibly good window control. It is in fact so good, people decided to build window managers on top of Emacs - see EXWM. Yes, the customization is complex and very confusing for beginners, but the levels of control are all there.
That was 12 years ago. Are you complaining that Emacs got sane window management "only" twelve years ago? Please don't ever get into Node.js ecosystem, the pace of accretion would make you cry, standing in the shower, rocking back and forth.
Buddy I started using Emacs at version 1.8, and no display-buffer-alist is not "sane". Just maintaining a stable window arrangement in the frame is not something easily possible.
I'm not sure what you exactly talking about, I'm having hard time separating "facts" from "personal opinion" here. I'm not sure what you mean by "stable window arrangement" to be honest. As a practical example I can only think of "jumping between places" feature, where If I, for example to have multiple windows and tabs open in the same Emacs frame (well technically speaking, tabs kinda make separate pseudo frames, but anyway), I currently don't have good mechanism of finding "the place", there's no good way to build "the breadcrumbs path" where you can traverse through all the places visited, Emacs afaik doesn't have good mechanism of finding exact tab/window/buffer/location, I don't know how much of it is related to your idea of "stable window arrangement".
Overall, I'm personally happy with Emacs window management, it's highly customizable and extensible, it gives you powerful keyboard-centric control, it supports complex layouts, it is deeply integrated within Emacs' vast ecosystem. There are packages like ace-window, winum, winner-mode, golden-ratio, shackle, popwin, eyebrowse, perspective, window-purpose, etc. I don't know what you're complaining about, I guess because I have not seen something even better than that.
he goes by the moniker 'prot' and has tons of very very good emacs information (both on his website, and youtube). always worthwhile to check them out !
as someone would say, if you like that kind of thing, this the is kind of thing you will like :o)
After years of vim and windows parkour, I started using Emacs, and while the windows management was a bit irritating at first, I made my peace with it and use them in a more focused manner and rely more on the buffer list. I use register if I need a particular configuration.
Vim feels like working on a moodboard while Emacs is more a study desk.
I've been using Emacs for 25 years daily and this is still the thing that I think hasn't been really thought through. Yes there are hacks to mitigate that but there are still many rough edges with them.
