Similar experience but with wmii. I wanted a tiling WM for a tiny hdd, tried wmii, MOD-Enter for term, MOD-<n> for workspace, a few ones to cycle through. Deal. It has some glitches, like MOD being swallowed somehow, maybe i3 doesn't have that. But so far I don't really miss XMonad. I do miss it because it's rock solid, it's Haskell, but wmii/i3 get you going in less than 1MB.