When I first came to Lazarus I was quite shocked of the floating windows. By time I saw the benefits compared to a strict one-window-layout and I now highly prefer the floating windows. But still the windows hiding each other often is a mess. The alignment is difficult (additional efforts) and large window borders take precious space.
There should be a better solution I thought, and came to a one as sketched in the attachement, a mixture of floating and fixed concepts. The cyan line shows the application window, this means there would be a free space on the right side, where the floating Forms and menues can be reached. I'm not sure if such window contours are possible on all platforms...
The application window would consist of the menu, the source editor, object inspector (and tabbed some other important tools) and message box. All other menues and forms would open in a seperate window as now. When they lose focus, a part of them still could be visible in the "cut-out" right area and thus easily clicked to bring back to front.
The source editor could be configured to dynamically overlay the menu and message box (focus controlled) so there is maximum space for the source code, like it is possible in the floating design.
Just a crazy idea that I wanted to share~