It's more of a shortcut-driven automanagement of windows. When I see people in "normal" windowing environments work, the workflow goes: open an app, drag it to the correct monitor and corner of that monitor, and then optionally manually resize it. Bonus points for taking a few seconds to fish for the exact edge of the window's frame when resizing. Or misclicking when aiming for the title bar and opening a menu instead or hiding the window because you clicked on some other window it was hovering over.
Tiling window managers: open application, and the window manager puts it in a sensible position most of the time. Use shortcuts to quickly correct its placement, if necessary. Typically shortcuts are something like
- switch to master pane (the biggest pane on the screen)
In terms of a command line metaphor, it is the keyboard shortcuts for accessing history or editing the text of a command. It is not a command line in the sense of options to grep.
But what it is most like (switching to simile) is Emacs window manager...by which I mean that Emacs uses a tiling window manager.
I'd say it's more like a terminal multiplexer for window management, if you're familiar with screen or tmux. (Using XMonad for windows and using tmux for collections of shells / terminal apps have followed similar tracks in my life.)
