I was in the same boat. I've used tiling WM's full time for maybe the past decade (xmonad, i3, awesome, dwm, scrotwm/spectrwm). Also I use rxvt-unicode with t

I was in the same boat. I've used tiling WM's full time for maybe the past decade (xmonad, i3, awesome, dwm, scrotwm/spectrwm). Also I use rxvt-unicode with the tabs extension. That's in addition to tmux. In practice, I do not perceive redundancy. Using the tiling WM to keep the layout of terminals doesn't persist across login/logout or even the X session. Also, you can SSH to the box via another machine and have the layout there waiting for you. Another factor that played a roll in it probably was irssi / weechat and ssh'ing into a remote box for it. No special splits or anything crazy, just using the attach/detach feature. I started with screen. Eventually moved to tmux (one thing I missed from screen was easily being able to share the 'session', though I forgot screen's terminology for that). Then for a time, I saw tmuxinator and teamocil out there, but felt meh, don't feel like keeping a bunch of config files floating around. This was before it came a trend to store dot-configs in git. When I realized I could have a dot config persisted across my machines (local network and remote) via git, that's when keeping project files became less an abstract nicety and more of a time saver. I see many gradually evolve into trying a session manager out, but also see many (like another commenter ITT) who get by fine with a simple script.