Sure, they certainly do look snazzy, especially when coupled with the movie hacker-approved unified dark color scheme. New windows pop up and quickly assume their rightful space and everything just looks so darn tidy.

But for certain usage patterns, that doesn't get you a lot. Even if you're popping up disposable shell windows left and right, you might also do that within screen/tmux, where the window manager doesn't come into play at all (or have some drop-down quake-like console). Also, your running applications and especially their different configurations might not change that often, in which case you're really saving yourself some manual layout fiddling once. So a lot of people would perform pretty much the same with just alt-tab window cycling and virtual desktops (which seem orthogonal to the whole deal).

I mean, if you look at the vast majority of screenshots, you don't even see that much work. The obligatory IRC client, fake-GUI music players and/or file managers and probably an editor with the configuration file or some minor coursework open. It's not exactly Scotty and his Mac Plus.

Having said that, I'd add my vote to i3wm, as it isn't as ideologically pure as some others (you still have window titles if you want them, and the layout remains somewhat manual). Plus a rather readable configuration format, even if the default configuration is seemingly intended to drive vi-users mad.

My alternative would be bspwm, the binary space partitioning wm. A lot more minimal, but the automatic layout algorithm is rather tractable and one certainly wouldn't be confused with too many options.

I like i3 a lot, but even as an Emacs user the first thing I did was to change the focus key bindings to something vi-like. Using JKL; instead of HJKL on anything meant for Unix users just seems devilishly perverse.

Well, this applies to all WM screenshots ever, not just tiling window managers. The main problem with WM screenshots is that you want to show how it looks, show off some features, but my actual work is generally spread across many virtual desktops, each with just a few windows (mostly xterm)

I blame it more on the fact that many of the tiling wm crowd are quite young and don't do that much actual work with their machines, especially if they just switch to Linux because of other screenshots of said style.

Or just not being able to show e.g. proprietary code…

To be honest I like using tiling WMs because they're not magic, whizz-bang things. I could lay out my windows better with a stacking WM (eg. when badly-behaved apps make assumptions about their size and put buttons off the edge of the screen), but a tiling WM does just well enough that I really don't care about my window layout anymore. Whatever Xmonad does is usually fine.

Likewise, with a tiling window manager I really don't care about background pictures anymore. Before using tiling WMs I used to use chbg to cycle through a directory of images, and use (fake, then composited) transparency in terminals, etc. These days my machines boot straight into Xmonad with st and emacs open; my only "background" is a black screen for a couple of seconds while they start up.

Any screenshot I take would just advertise whatever fullscreen application I have open at the moment, along with a line of text at the top of the screen with a clock and counters for my unread email and failing tests.

Certainly. It's always hard to judge age on the 'net, but looking at the relevant discussions on reddit or linux forums, you'll find an astonishingly uniform spread of applications, and if you find any code that's not the configuration of the window manager, it'll be some kind of programming 101 material. This, along with the "just installed Linux, this is my new awesome desktop" makes me a bit biased towards assuming a large quantity of teenagers -- also more likely to generally proactively show their neat desktops.

This doesn't mean that every tiling wm user is that way (I certainly am not), just like pinterest isn't a good indicator about the prevalence of refurbished palettes in American bedrooms...

I would say that you probably have more in common with corporate windows users who have their apps running fullscreen all the time, too and that way don't ever changed their backgroudn from Napa valley, than with the "unix ricers" who regularly apply patches to their minimal wms that leave large borders around their windows, so that their background is still evident.

    My alternative would be bspwm, the binary space partitioning wm.

I've started to notice I often have i3 open with an xterm running screen in which I'm running vim with multiple buffers. I should start using ctrl-alt-F* so I have 4 layers of context switching...

I'm thinking about trying the new Guile window manager that popped up here a few days back, it looks like it has a StumpWM-esque style and maybe Guile is a little more light-weight/less flaky than most Common Lisp implementations.

Thanks for bringing this to my attention! I'm a StumpWM fan too and it looks like Guile-WM has promise. Here's the homepage for anyone else interested:

http://www.markwitmer.com/guile-xcb/guile-wm.html

The nicest things about a tiling manager? You can control nearly everything from the keyboard. It's very quick and easy to set up side-by-side windows (or side/top-bottom, and so on), and resizing one automatically resizes the other. It really helps on smaller screens, since by default everything is full screen with minimal window decoration.

Some nice features of i3wm in particular - well developed manual control, most layouts can be expressed as the composition of simpler layouts, and the config file is just a config file, not a full fledged program.

Also, it's worth remembering that on Linux you can have multiple WMs installed at the same time. You can log in to i3wm, and if there's something you really can't figure out, you can log out and switch to gnome/kde/etc. I don't know if there's a way to switch WMs without shutting down the whole x session though. Would be interested to know if it's possible.

Some WM's support the '--replace' flag (Both the WM being replaced and the one you're starting have to support it). If you run a new WM with the '--replace' flag, the old WM will shutdown and the new WM will take-over all the windows it was handling. This is only switching WM's though, so you can't really switch into Gnome or KDE doing this and then switch-out. i3 doesn't support it though (It would have a bit of a hard time supporting it anyway), so you can't do it with i3.

If you can't do it that way though, then just have your X session start a terminal on screen instead of a WM. The X session will stay live as long as that terminal stays open, so you can start and kill any number of WM's as you want as long as your other programs don't mind it. Not everything shuts down very cleanly though, so you might not be able to start and close Gnome and then start KDE in the same session. You should be able to kill i3 and start openbox or xfwm though, for example.

Personally I'm still waiting for a tiling WM with mouse support - having used a few keyboard based WMs, and having used Eclipse, I find Eclipse to be by far the nicest. The only problem being that it's an application panel manager, not an X windows manager :(

The features I want from a WM: http://shimmie.shishnet.org/v2/_images/ae13a6ed6a5d725f34d10...

I just wish I could find a decent tilinging manager for OS X (divvy and amethyst do not fit my requirements)

If I feel like trying a tiling wm again, I think I'd go with xmonad. From reading, it seems to have decent defaults, and it'd a good opportunity to start playing with Haskell.

I wish integrating tiling wm's with regular DE's, even lightweight ones (lxde, xfce) would be more popular. When switching all out to awesome, I missed the conveniences like a tray with wifi and sound volume. I just want a DE, with tiling windows!

  apt-get install xmonad gnome-panel

  import XMonad
  import XMonad.Config.Gnome

  main = do
      xmonad $ gnomeConfig

https://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Using_xmonad_in_X...

The layout snapshots is really handy to jumpstart the day and put everything in place. Keyboard shortcuts allow resizing and moving windows around. It's highly configurable, so you can add or remove features as you see fit. I'd give the free trial a spin.

[0] http://manytricks.com/moom/

Are there any tiling WMs which support this layout style or can be easily configured to do so?

https://github.com/SirCmpwn/dotfiles/blob/master/i3/config

The main advantage of it tho, is not the tiling window managing facilities... But the run-or-raise plugin.

It allows you to run (start) or raise (go to the window) of any application with an assigned shortcut.

Mine are: Mod+e - Emacs Mod+u - Browser (Conkeror) Mod+y - Browser (Chromium) Mod+k - Konsole Mod+. - Keepass Mod+x - Pidgin chat window Mod+i - Skype chat window

The choice of shortcuts may seen arbitrary, but I'm a Dvorak user and all the keys are easily accessible.

With this setup, from my editor I'm a Mod+u / Ctrl+g g to a search on google, and from there I'm a Mod+k from my terminal (from where I run tmux... ;P) and a Mod+e from Emacs.

I'm also using a dropdown terminal with another tmux where I have access, from any where on my system just pressing F1, to my MTA (mutt), file manager (mc), IRC (irssi), Music player (cmus) and a root shell.

Honestly... With this setup there is definetly no going back... Every thing on the tips of my fingers... Some shortcut away.

I almost feel part of the machine! :)

I got same issues like you and here's my advice: install i3 and try to use it, after 2-3 days you'll be able to move windows, switch them or run apps with only keyboard (keybindings are pretty intuitive, but you need to try). Don't try to use it for every task or force yourself to use only it - I hate it when have to deal with some windows apps in wine, which are opening alerts and windows like shit, and then simply switch to gnome or sth. Don't try to customize everything at once, but rather slowly find your real needs and google around how to make your system your best tool.

I can't go back to a non-tiling manager now!

Now I'm back to the default window manager of xfce4, which is ok since I tend to use only emacs and a browser, so I have have one workspace for each.

Just run "wmname LG3D" then restart any open Java programs.

LG3D is "Looking Glass 3D", a Java window manager http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Looking_Glass . It's quite amusing that Java's UI toolkit contains special-cases to avoid breaking their demos.

I wouldn't consider myself an expert and found the change (I'm otherwise a Gnome kind of guy) easy enough. Is there anything specific you have trouble with?