Tiling window manger (TWM) can be very effective on large screen. Some advantages for developers (or disadvantages for heavy mouse users) are following:
- Makes keyboard the primary input device. As a programmer, keyboard is your primary weapon and switching back and forth to mouse is wastage of time.
- Makes terminal the primary interface. This is incredible useful for heavy user of vim/screen/tmux etc.
- Utilises the space provided by large screen effectively. Makes it very easy to see multiple windows at the same time. Think of plotting/updating a graph after every run of simulation.
- Minimizes CPU usage by disabling fancy graphics.
There is a learning curve. You need to memorize/or learn useful commands. It could also cause headache sometime since often used applets may not be available e.g. nm-applet. Anyway, with time and patience, these can be put into your configuration.
I've used following TWM
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dwm (dynamic window manager). Very lightweight and safe. The customization has to be done in source code only (which is C) .
. More popular. Quite a large user base. Currently using it and quiet happy with it. The default configuration and pretty good. The wiki is well documented with quite a lot of examples. Scripted via Lua.