I’ve been exploring window managers and it isn’t the navel-gazing activity that it might seem. A coworker turned me on to Ratpoison, a keyboard-driven tiling manager, think of it as the equivalent of screen for X-windows. I like the automagic management and the tiling but I prefer tabs and need to run the occasional mouse-driven windowing app (firefox, etc.).

Ion3 is more my style. It’s small, fast, keyboard-driven with mouse support, tiling and tabbing, and relatively unobtrusive. It also supports traditional “floating” windows. It uses Lua as an extension language which adds to its appeal, I’ve meant to look at Lua for some time.

Ion gives me almost exactly what I want- keyboard control, several workspaces tiled and tabbed, one or two workspaces in the normal way, and in all light on system resources. I have some issues to solve or work around- mostly that Firefox is ill-behaved and generally broken but Opera and Konqueror work.