Using another Arduino IDE window separately for the serial monitor tear-up has been a wonderful workaround!
It great to see the code independently rather than a shared view, specially on small monitors.
I hope the dev-gods see some sense in bringing back the earlier experience rather than
bring about some crazy unnecessary changes.
Moved to IDE 2.x category....as is more relevant to IDE 2.x.
How did you manage to get the serial monitor out of the window?
This is IDE 2.x.x right?
Just curious.
OP runs two instances of the IDE (e.g. ope a new sketch to get the second instance). In the one he/she (probably) does not run the serial monitor but uses it for compile/upload; in the other one he/she uses serial monitor only (or better, only looks at serial monitor).
Just go File / New Sketch that opens a new window.
Click on Serial Monitor on that window and stretch it as far as it goes. There's our seperate Serial Monitor.