^ If you want an introduction to tiling wm's go with spectrwm. The configuration files are simple text files and well annotated, the man page is also excellent (the original developers were OpenBSD users), and it's good and stable. If you change the configuration, you can just restart the window manager, no need to recompile like you have to do with dwm.
It's in the repos and looks to be up to date (version 2.6). Or you can get the latest from git. I think the dependencies are already installed if you choose to compile from source.
The statusbar for spectrwm also works really well with conky or your own script.
more spectrwm - laptop this time, bored the last couple days so I cleaned up my stausbar script:
And yes, you get the most out of tiling window managers if you set up the key bindings (also easy to do with spectrwm). Although, I find the only practical, every day difference is that you can't close a window by clicking on the button - Alt-F4 (or whatever you set up) becomes second nature after about 2 days.
One thing I do since I do a lot of window manager hopping is to set all the key bindings the same; keeps my brain from over heating
