Was just looking at this article yesterday and it inspired me to try it myself. Trying it out today, my fingers became really sore from trying to navigate. Can't imagine using this for a modern development workflow where there's a lot of jumping around. To make it more ergonomic, I'd just be recreating configuration other window managers give me out of the box.

The author mentions in the footnotes he mostly uses this setup for note taking. That makes sense as he probably remains in one window for extended periods of time.