Kevin:
XMonad Fans,
I came across XMonad yesterday, and I think I'm hooked.
Welcome!
I've been using XFCE for quite a while. But, I usually kill the XFCE panel, start an XFCE-terminal session, maximize it, then launch applications, most of which I also maximize, from there. Recently someone posted to the Debian mailing list asking for window manager suggestions on maximizing screen real estate. I replied detailing my XFCE habits. I then received a few replies asking why I was using XFCE, and got some suggestions of other window managers I might try that would be more to my liking.
You might be interested to see the XFCE support xmonad has. It can be a nice intermediate step between a full desktop environment based on overlapping windows, and the tiling paradigm: http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Using_xmonad_in_XFCE (There' similar support for gnome and kde).
Most of the suggestions were for tabbed/tiling window managers, such as Ion, etc. I had looked briefly at similar window managers in the past and didn't think I'd like them because I prefer to run most apps full screen.
Ah, then you'll be happy with xmonad. fullscreen for all clients is a builtin layout.
After taking a closer look at some of the suggested window managers I discovered some of them had a full screen mode with minimal or no window decorations, and could be used almost entirely from the keyboard which is just what I've been looking for all along. After trying a few I had just about settled on Ion. Then ...
Yesterday while surfing the net to make sure I hadn't overlooked any possibilities I came across info on XMonad. I'm currently running Debian Lenny but the only Debian XMonad package I could find was for Sid. I dropped the Sid package into my local repository and was able to install and run it successfully. I hit a snag when I started trying to tweak the configuration. After a little trial and error I discovered I had to install Haskell and a few Haskell libraries, also from Sid. But after doing so I was able to start customizing XMonad and so far all is working well.
Sorry for rambling on so much. Bottom line - my congratulations and many thanks to the XMonad developers for such a well designed window manager.
Great, hope you enjoy the ride! -- Don