I've been thinking about trying a tiling window manager, since I despise using the touchpad on my ThinkPad and Emacs and my MBA's touchpad have spoiled me on never really moving my hands from the keyboard. I thought about xmonad but now is not the time I want to spend diving into Haskell.
This seems like a great middle ground. I'll be trying it this week.
XMonad is very good, but is only a window manager (eg, no toolbar), so you need to fiddle with configuration files to integrate it with a third-party toolbar (eg, xmobar or taffybar). You can try awesome, which I found much easier to use out-of-the-box. It's fairly mature by now, features a clickable toolbar, and a library of additional widgets.
Been using qtile on my TP for 3 years. At work I'm running it in a vm on a MBP with my nice unicomp keyboard.
If you like Python and tiling, I'm convinced this is the way to go. Xmonad is cool but requires Haskell (not that that is good or bad, it's just the way it is) and I'm already proficient in Python.
This seems like a great middle ground. I'll be trying it this week.