> However having access to things like a network manager to join wireless networks, a battery indicator, a volume control, etc is essential in today's world, which is why I now run a heavyweight xfce environment.

You don't need to run a full DE to have tray icons. I'm running i3 and the network manager applet + other tray items work just fine.

This is somewhat orthogonal to what window manager you are running though. Most tiling WMs (e.g. xmonad) combine nicely with xfce[1], giving you all the convenience features you mention while still not having to mess around with moving and resizing windows. I've been using that combination for years and wouldn't want to switch back to either plain xmonad or plain xfce.

[1] https://wiki.haskell.org/Xmonad/Using_xmonad_in_XFCE

You can have those with a window manager too, but in this case you need to do more fiddling

I use xmonad with stalonetray [1] (which as you may guess from the name is a standalone notification tray) and dzen2 [2] as a notification area for basic information ( battery / cpu / temperature / wifi status ). With them I cover enough of my needs and I don't feel the need to anything more complex.

I think that it would be nice to have some middle ground between a full desktop environment and bare-bone and manually configured window manager though.

[1] http://stalonetray.sourceforge.net/ [2] https://github.com/robm/dzen

Same.

If they did a simple non tiling WM that had those little things in it and wasn't a piece of crap, I'd be there like a shot.

LXDE/LXQt is what I think of when I read your descriptions.

It's Openbox (which is a really capable, lightweight non-tiling window manager) plus a panel plus Xfce Power Manager and similar applications to handle the desktop environment stuff.

Thanks - will definitely take a look at that over the weekend. The lighter the better for me.

I have all those things with spectrwm and dmenu.