The disadvantage of that is that i3 is not aware of a window's contents. A terminal multiplexer however knows what the current working directory in each termina

The disadvantage of that is that i3 is not aware of a window's contents. A terminal multiplexer however knows what the current working directory in each terminal pane is, and if you open a new split it can be automatically set to the same path. This makes the whole process a little bit smoother.