After about a year of sticking with ratpoison, I grew tired of the lack of updates and tweaks for it. Sure I had 2 desktops with rpws, and all my keybindings set up but, I ran into the problem of having the same setup day after day. Soon I began looking at other window managers similar to ratpoison.
Stumpwm
I found Stumpwm, and used it for a couple months, while learning lisp, and configured it the way I wanted it. A big issue I found with stump was that most of ratpoison's stability hadn't been carried over, and once in a while it would reset when trying to add new things. A big advantage was that it was realtime. I also grew tired of not having a statusbar so I added one, but, it wasn't what I hoped it would be.
AwesomeWM
Then I heard about AwesomeWM. I had heard about it previously on the archlinux forums, and decided to install it. The first thing I noticed was the menu, statusbar and floating layer by default. After themeing it, and setting up some tweaks in my rc.lua I was rolling. Probably the quickest setup of any of my WMs so far. One thing I have come to love is the different widgets, and workspace layouts. One such widget is called eminent this allows me to only show the workspaces I use, and dynamically close them once I am finished. By keeping different layouts in different workspaces, this has made me more organized. I have a workspace for internet browsing which is floating, a dl workspace for downloads which is max, a work workspace which is fullscreen so I don't get distracted, and a term workspace for all my terminal activity which is tiled for maximum efficiency. I have more workspaces but those are the application based ones that I actually use right now.
Another widget I love is an expose like view of all my windows so I can easily select one using the arrow keys called revelation.
Here is a screenshot of my desktop (workspace 1):
Currently I am also using linux-ck from the AUR with lots of patches my system has never been faster and more efficient than it is with AwesomeWM.
