True. slock can be used as well. Although dmenu is not really needed, it does complement i3 very well and is meant to be used with it.

Spectrwm also uses dmenu. I would miss it even if I was using a desktop. Especially for touch-typing, it is so much easier to press a menu key and type the first few letters of a command to execute it, rather than moving a hand over to the mouse and clicking through menus and sub-menus.

The implication that users of non-tiling-wm's "constantly resize and move windows" always puzzles me until I realize most users use graphical applications these days. Those of us who use mostly cli applications in xterms hardly ever move or resize our windows at all.

About fifteen years ago I wrote some short scripts to populate a virtual desktop with particular arrangements of xterms, and have only been tweaking them (the scripts) occasionally since. Once a desktop is thus populated, I don't move or resize the xterms, but only doubleclick titlebars to shade/unshade xterms as needed (similar to selecting a tab in tabbed terminal emulators):

http://ciar.org/ttk/public/2xs
http://ciar.org/ttk/public/2xu
http://ciar.org/ttk/public/screenshot.tabbed.gif

Some virtual desktops get near-fullscreen firefox windows, but other than that, and the occasional (and transitory) xv, xpaint, xfig, and xine instances, it's all cli.

I, too, appreciate never having to move my fingers from the home row. Using a keyboard with a trackpoint device allows this even while moving the pointer:

http://ciar.org/ttk/public/trackpoint.1.jpg
http://ciar.org/ttk/public/trackpoint.2.jpg

I love this interface so much, I purchased lenovo keyboards for all of my desktops, at home and at the office.

There are a lot of good tilers out there, i3 and xmonad are good examples. Though both (especially xmonad) require a lot of extra dependencies. My recommendation for a default tiler would be ratpoison. It's and old classic that's still actively maintained. It has next to no dependencies, and generally speaking it's a very nice standard tiler. It's very simple and straight forward, has all the necessary features, but not much else. Reading the man page is a breeze!

I think most how need a tiler will find what they need in ratpoison, but for those that don't one can always grab xmonad, i3 or one of the other from slackbuilds.

PS! I would absolutely love it if Slackware came with a tiler by default, even if it isn't ratpoison

i like to see i3 , i3status and dmenu included

Me, too. I'm using ratpoison in a similar setting. For managing windows, I've set up key combinations resembling those for buffer management in Emacs (as well as other), only the prefix is not C-x, but rather Win-X (to allow simultaneous use of Emacs and ratpoison).

There is also a new re-write of ratpoison in something like a real Lisp, but when I needed it, I couldn't install it as smoothly as ratpoison. That's why I'm happily using the old ratpoison for several years already.

Quite a few window managers tend to clash with old-school application hot keys, and putting all the window management hotkeys on the Win key is a good way of working around that and kind of makes sense. I'm curious now whether this is common practice.

Of course if I ever end up with a keyboard without a Win key, I'm going to have to rethink things.

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I've used half-a-dozen tiling window managers and they all let the user define a key, most of them defaulted to using the Win key or Alt.

I also use the Windows key for keybindings related to i3, since I otherwise have absolutely no use for that key (I don't use it on Windows either). Thinking about it, it somewhat makes sense to use the Windows key for window management literally.

My first tiling wm was awesomeWM. I used it on ubuntu for a while, and like it very much. When I converted that laptop over to debian, I immediately installed awesome, and I'm quite happy.

I wanted to get something light and nerdy running on my slackware 14 lappy, so first I tried the included wms, kinda liked window maker (suuuper light) but wanted tiling. As there was no slackbuild for awesomeWM, I went with Xmonad. It was a challenge to set up the first time, but now its working well.

I've got the same keybindings (more or less) as I do in awesome, and it is nice and quick. Very bare bones, which I like. I'd like to see an official slackbuild for awesome tho.

@ahzthecat Awesome is(was) awesome but find it too fast evolving and breaking API several times in a relatively short period. The second issue is with the Lua itself, because there is no mature/reliable module/library for multithreading/multiprocessing support (LuaLanes is far from mature) so I simply couldn't feed monitor in panel with output of a separate thread/process in other way but launching a fat independent shell script around awesome-client and spawned output info process.
On the other hand current Lua implementation even with LuaJit is blazingly fast with very low memory footprint and very simple and effective syntax & types one can completely learn in a few hours.

Xmonad is my favorite, but in terms of possible inclusion in Slackware, I'd vote for i3 because of the lighter dependencies. I too think it would be great to have a tiling WM by default.

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I've used pytyle 1 with openbox. Now i'm using just openbox actions to resize and place windows.

I really hope i3 will be include in Slackware in the future.

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