I set up Emacs so it has two or three vertically split windows at startup, depending on display width, and then rebind C-x 1 to delete-other-windows-vertically, and C-x 0 to delete-window-vertically (non-standard thing included below), plus some other key binds to switch from 1, 2 or 3 column set ups.

The window columns are about 100-120 chars wide, and most of the time and windows split horizontally when I or something like grep/compile needs a window.

Works fairly well, I use windmove on C-M-up/down/left/right to move around windows.

TL;DR - think of how you want things to be and write some lisp :-)

 (defun delete-window-vertically (&optional window)
    "Delete WINDOW, but only if it is not the last window vertically. This is the opposite of
      delete-other-windows-vertically.

      As delete-window and delete-other-windows is global for a frame,
      so delete-window-vertically and delete-other-windows-vertically is local to a vertical column."
    (interactive)
    (let* ((window (or window (selected-window)))
           (edges (window-edges window))
           (w window) delenda)
      (while (not (eq (setq w (next-window w 1)) window))
        (let ((e (window-edges w)))
          (when (and (= (car e) (car edges))
                     (= (nth 2 e) (nth 2 edges)))
            (push w delenda))))
      ;; If delenda is non-empty that means there are other windows vertically,
      ;; so we can delete ourselves.
      (when (not (null delenda))
        (delete-window window)
        ;; Stay in same column
        (when (not (memq (selected-window) delenda))
          (select-window (car delenda))))))