saeidw wroteBy the way, I found Windows 7 to be kind of keyboard friendly. With a window focused, WinKey + {Up,Down,Left,Right} will respectively: Maximize, Minimize, Snap to Left, and Snap to Right.
It takes a few seconds every morning to set up a tiled layout.
Right, but it's quite weak in comparison. To get a better experience I had to get third party software that provide more tiling options. Not to mention the inability to hide the title bars and borders, which is a big plus in tiling WMs.

For the record I'm almost giving up on xmonad for rather silly reasons.

- I tend to close apps in i3 with mod shift Q, this exits xmonad :-( you have no idea how many times I logged out of my session where I meant to simply close a client. Yes I can remap, but I really don't want to do that granted the less I need to configure the easier it is to maintain across machines and fresh installs.

- Haskell is somewhat alien to me, I didn't enjoy the configuration much. I'd rather stick with Lua, which for the most part is more fit for such tasks.
xterm wrote- Haskell is somewhat alien to me, I didn't enjoy the configuration much. I'd rather stick with Lua, which for the most part is more fit for such tasks.
I definitely agree on that point, it is a weird choice to do configuration, and I'm still not sure if the power it gives you is worth the trouble. I do like Haskell though, and I wanted to learn it anyway so I got used to it, but Lua definitely wins in this aspect.

The solution to your first problem is obvious, though: never close a window!
You're using a tiling wm, just switch to a new workspace and open more stuff! Solved!

That last paragraph was a joke :)
saeidw wroteThat last paragraph was a joke :)
nevertheless, I have 4 workspaces that remain the same at all times

W1 - 3 terminals, a main one for Vim, one with an interactive python shell running at all times, one for anything else related to terminal functions.
W2 - Chrome
W3 - IM clients
W4 - File manager, media stuff
W5 to W9 - temporary clients that i use for a short while. Those are the ones that I close often.

-

On a side note I'm still trying to find a decent terminal IM client! Empathy is boring, Pidgin is ugly. I tried Irssi with xmpp plugin but it's really annoying to deal with.

If I can't find something to my taste may as well end up writing my own but I'm dreading the horror of 'curses'.
7 months later
2 months later
I'm reviving this thread because I can't emphasize enough on the benefits of using a Tiling WM.
Okay, peripheral question: Does anyone know of something similar to tiling WM on the mac OS X platform?
I tried Shiftit and Divvy.

They don't hold a candle to the TWMs we use.
I've been using Divvy since yesterday. It's not good enough. Thanks mentioning Shiftit, I'll try it.
What don't you like about Divvy?
Shiftit is not bad compared to Divvy, but it lacks a lot compared to others.

I'm currently testing the 2 following TWMs xnomad and slate.
10 days later