For historical research and writing, the use of a dedicated tiling window manager and other customizable FOSS tools improves efficiency. With a bit of work, manuscript facsimiles, database query tools, and other items that a historian might need to have opened simultaneously can be sorted exactly how he/she wishes, freeing crucial time from organization for proper analysis. In this presentation, I explain how to optimize a multisource historical research workflow inside a tiling window manager with an entirely libre software toolkit.