well, let's do some background: over the years I've become more and more minimalistic. this carries over into alot of different aspects, but one of the most relevant is in my window manager usage. when I first began my linux escapades ~5 years ago (yeah, late bloomer) I was using gnome (on SuSe, no less). gnome was cool and I liked the eye candy and the applets.
after some time, I relised there was so much stuff I didn't use, and began stripping pieces off of it. eventually, I came across this wonderful thing called blackbox. blackbox was my friend for a while (at this point fluxbox was at 0.1.14 and the distros I used didn't have the devel releases). when I moved to Arch, I began using fluxbox, as I was able to get the devel releases (eventually).
soon, I had custom compiled fluxbox, removing the toolbar and slot and all the stuff besides window decorations. This was about the time I discovered screen. Well, to put it better, this was when I discovered the sheer power of screen. when I had first used screen, it was in my early days, so alot of the functionality escaped me.
now, blending my screen experiences (keychords, et al) with fluxbox, I eventually moved to WMI (thanks Dusty!). Recently, WMII has been in development: the second incarnation of WMI. I've followed it closely for a bit... but now it's beginning to steer away from the minimalism I liked about it.
A few days ago, I remembered ratpoison. I had used it some time ago but, like my first experience with screen, I didn't get it - not until now. ratpoison is great. ratpoison + screen + vim = keychord craziness....
to quote thegnu from the Arch forums:
You go BANG!! POW and you've done something awesome and amazing that I still can't really do all that often.
vim is kind of like nunchucks. It hurts until you learn to use it, then it's really powerful.