I use wmii.

I have used it. Not enough to really get the hang of it, though.

I've been using that mostly for the last year or so. By the looks of things, if I change anytime soon, it will be for dwm.

What is the point of these things? They seem to be very trendy but I can't really see why.

Do they allow you to work much faster than a traditional WM? If so why?

For me, it's not really about faster or better productivity, but thinking less. The layout is predefined, there's really not much to theme, most actions work on hotkeys, the screen real estate is available for programs and it takes less ressources.

I have a friend who does great use of the tags feature of wmii. Tags are basically workspaces, except application instances can have more then one tag, allowing it to appear on multiple workspaces. One for work, one for home, one for email, etc. And the same mail application instance will appear in both work and email. In his case, he's fully taking advantage of the workflow.

Plus, wmii borrows a lot from the plan 9 philosophy. You manipulate the environment by messing with a virtual file system. Much like ii does for IRC, again by the same developpers.

dwm is a little more contrived, which is why I'm preferring wmii for now. But eventually, I might find enough time to hack its code to suit my needs better.

It's not for everyone, but it's perfect for me. In Windows, I stopped using the Explorer shell in 1997 or 1998, I'm not sure anymore, preferring a very minimal litestep configuration instead showing only a clock, which was in fact an input box to launch programs.

Thank you Robin. That was very informative.

So much I felt compelled to reprint it on my blog and crediting you for the poke ;)

I used to use Enlightenment, but I keep falling back to Gnome. Not very cool or hip, but it just works for me. I almost don't see it anymore. It's great to have a choice isn't it?

I am an enlightenment evacuee too. I use xfce now. Very nice.

I stick to fluxbox. Or KDE when I'm too lazy to grab my ~/.fluxbox directory off my main box.

I use dwm for the small simplicity of it. I don't need fancy windows decorations and widgets and whatnot lying around. I've only used four window managers, though, so maybe I should give others like wmii a try.