I'm a fan of i3wm. It has fairly good documentation (I learned it on my own, primarily from the documentation), and a relatively active irc channel.
The nicest things about a tiling manager? You can control nearly everything from the keyboard. It's very quick and easy to set up side-by-side windows (or side/top-bottom, and so on), and resizing one automatically resizes the other. It really helps on smaller screens, since by default everything is full screen with minimal window decoration.
Some nice features of i3wm in particular - well developed manual control, most layouts can be expressed as the composition of simpler layouts, and the config file is just a config file, not a full fledged program.
Also, it's worth remembering that on Linux you can have multiple WMs installed at the same time. You can log in to i3wm, and if there's something you really can't figure out, you can log out and switch to gnome/kde/etc. I don't know if there's a way to switch WMs without shutting down the whole x session though. Would be interested to know if it's possible.
> I don't know if there's a way to switch WMs without shutting down the whole x session though. Would be interested to know if it's possible.
Some WM's support the '--replace' flag (Both the WM being replaced and the one you're starting have to support it). If you run a new WM with the '--replace' flag, the old WM will shutdown and the new WM will take-over all the windows it was handling. This is only switching WM's though, so you can't really switch into Gnome or KDE doing this and then switch-out. i3 doesn't support it though (It would have a bit of a hard time supporting it anyway), so you can't do it with i3.
If you can't do it that way though, then just have your X session start a terminal on screen instead of a WM. The X session will stay live as long as that terminal stays open, so you can start and kill any number of WM's as you want as long as your other programs don't mind it. Not everything shuts down very cleanly though, so you might not be able to start and close Gnome and then start KDE in the same session. You should be able to kill i3 and start openbox or xfwm though, for example.
> You can control nearly everything from the keyboard
Personally I'm still waiting for a tiling WM with mouse support - having used a few keyboard based WMs, and having used Eclipse, I find Eclipse to be by far the nicest. The only problem being that it's an application panel manager, not an X windows manager :(
Ok, for the dragging part I would have to come up with something, but theoretically, your desired features are possible. I just need some spare time to implement the layout plugins and come up with a good way to handle keyboard shortcuts in nested splits.
kwin is working on this. They ripped the tiling logic from the core somewhat recently but I believe they either added it back as an addon, or are in the process of doing so. You can email their ML for more info.
The nicest things about a tiling manager? You can control nearly everything from the keyboard. It's very quick and easy to set up side-by-side windows (or side/top-bottom, and so on), and resizing one automatically resizes the other. It really helps on smaller screens, since by default everything is full screen with minimal window decoration.
Some nice features of i3wm in particular - well developed manual control, most layouts can be expressed as the composition of simpler layouts, and the config file is just a config file, not a full fledged program.
Also, it's worth remembering that on Linux you can have multiple WMs installed at the same time. You can log in to i3wm, and if there's something you really can't figure out, you can log out and switch to gnome/kde/etc. I don't know if there's a way to switch WMs without shutting down the whole x session though. Would be interested to know if it's possible.