I've been using i3 for about two years. I sampled a few other tiling WMs, including awesome, before settling on i3. Realistically there isn't much difference between them in terms of the features that I personally use, but these are the main things that sealed it for me:

* Tree-based/hierarchical tiling.

* Simple as hell multi-monitor.

* Beautiful config file [1].

* JSON API [2]

* Modal, vim-like key bindings.

[1] http://code.stapelberg.de/git/i3/tree/i3.config [2] http://i3wm.org/docs/ipc.html

I haven't used i3, but I did use awesome for about a year before settling on Xfce. The thing all the tiling window managers don't have is a compositor. I don't care about shadows or animations, but it makes everything seem smoother and faster. The compositor in Xfce uses xrender instead of opengl, so it works pretty well even on low-end machines.

Wish there was a cool reason to tell you, but it was just because somebody happened to be extolling the virtues of i3 in a similar HN discussion a few months back, so I gave it a whirl. I'm sure Awesome and Xmonad are great too, but all my needs are met so haven't really had a reason to shop around.

Looking back on all the hours I used to spend tweaking and fiddling with configs for things that I no longer use has made me sort of a setup minimalist -- anything that's not broken for me usually stays pretty close to stock these days.

Awesome is nice, but is much more heavyweight. It depends on Lua, and the dialect of its configuration file changes.

i3wm has no such dependencies, covers 80% of awesome's use cases, and is stable.

What kind of things does Awesome excel at what i3 can't or doesn't do well? (Awesome user here)

I have dabbled with many WMs, including i3. I have settled on awesome. These are the shortcomings of i3 for my usage.

1. Multimonitor. i3 has 9 tags that are shared between all attached monitors. So, if you have 3 monitors, the distribution of tags may turn out to be [1,4,5,6], [2,8], [3,7,9]. You can move tags from monitor to monitor, but AFAIK, you can't exceed 9. I have a habit of keeping email, browser, music player, and chat program on one tab each. So, this limitation of 9 tags just kills it for me.

2. awesome has better placement of floating windows.

3. Vertical task/status bar. This is a minor issue, but I wish i3 comes with one.

If i3 fixes these things, I'd switch to it in a heartbeat. i3 has a saner config, and a much more elegant tiling layout.

You can certainly have more than 9 tags on i3. In fact you can have tags with arbitrary names. They are a bit more difficult to manage with the default config, because only the default 9 have keybindings. But you can create your own tags and bind keys to assign windows to them or switch to them with a custom config.

You can also use a tabbed window layout (Super + E) to keep multiple programs full-screen on one tag. Then you can switch between them with the tabs at the top or Super + J, Super + ;.

What do you think is lacking in i3's documentation?

http://i3wm.org/docs/