In my experience, for the sake of mental organization and not sending the wrong command to the wrong place, there's a case to be made for "namespacing" all activity around a certain task/environment in a singular shell, which makes job handling with fore- and backgrounding relevant. For example, I'll be iterating on a script targeting a new deployment environment that requires certain env vars and a history of related commands, then running it to see if it works, and reflexively I'm more likely to open & edit the script, then ctrl+z the editor and run the script than to open the editor in a separate window in my experience. That said, I certainly have sometimes thought "you know, you could just edit the script in another window."

I did only just learn about ":stop" with this message, though. For me, the surprising thing is implementing in vim what users can do by hitting ctrl+z (and which I do daily in vim with ctrl+z). Even before getting to the window system, the shell's already got this covered by giving you the ability to background the application: why add lines of code to your application to do it again? But perhaps there is a scripting utility to having it within vim itself.

Cheers,

Marshall