Window managers

I have been dealing a lot lately with trying to optimize my work conditions as well as my work throughput. One thing I have taken to is really looking for an optimal and minimalist user interface for development. I got very tired of the stock Unity interface on Ubuntu, so recently switched to XFCE for window management, as well as tmux and vi for a lot of simple coding. One thing that bugs me having spent my bioinformatics days on a mac is that the bar at the bottom of XFCE does not behave the same, so I end up wasting time opening extra terminals instead of switching to the terminal I already have. I might be able to deal with this through configuration. The other issue though is that I work in full screen VMs and that is where the little menu for virtualbox shows up. I am tempted to give Xmonad a try next week to see how that works out. It could fit my minimalist style. On the windows front I am using Dexpot to manage multiple desktops and assign different tasks to them. So far I have not really done anything heavy on this machine, however it will be an interesting experiment. This weekend I will be preparing my presentation using HTML5/JS/CSS3 so it will be a good first test. On the productivity side of things I am working on getting my typing speed up. I use to be a much faster typist, however all those years away from programming have done me no good. To that end I am using typing.io, a small webapp to practice typing code in various languages.