I'm a sucker for "productivity hacks", and I keep trying these things. It always seems to happen in the morning right before work, and I lose a good half hour of productivity tweaking with the thing. dwm, wmii, xmonad, i3, scummwm, et cetera, et cetera. It seems like the only one I've never tried is ratpoison.

I fall for the hype ("I'm so much more productive when I don't have to worry about arranging stupid windows on my screen!!!1!") and do a quick package install and a logout/login. An initial pause to appreciate the minimalism, followed by confusion and panic if there's no obvious way to get a help screen. A long period of "this will be better once I get the keybindings under my fingers".

And finally I realize that I really don't spend that much time rearranging windows on my Gnome 2 desktop. I like the panel with its system tray, and after years of use the keybindings are almost hard-wired to my fingers. I realize that Gnome remembers where I put the windows for my various apps, and I usually never mess with their positioning anyway. Kupfer enables me to launch apps and do lots of things from the keyboard. And anyway when I'm working I'm just going back and forth between Emacs, a terminal, and Firefox. And so it's back to the normal.

I like the idea of tiling window managers. I like the anti-design aesthetic, especially of dwm and wmii. I'm fascinated by different interface paradigms, especially ones that don't rely on physical metaphors (I've come to really loathe skeuomorphs in UI design). I've been quite willing to try out alternative keyboards. Tiling window managers are fascinating, but I haven't found one compelling enough to wean me from Gnome2.