Maximumize was the part of compiz that I missed the most when I started trying a variety of window managers, until I got into messing with tiling WMs.

I would recommend looking at xmonad if you use Xinerama. It’s what I have been using for a while now. I had to switch to Xinerama to make it work well with multiple displays, but think that it was probably worth switching (although I still haven’t modified my shell scripts I was using to launch hulu and mplayer on the tv.. i modified my shiftTo hook to auto take hulu over there though). greedyView is weird, but I kind of like it (I can switch to a tag on my other monitor and pull it onto this monitor, rearrange, switch back/swapping what was on one monitor for the other). Takes a little bit to get used to the Haskell syntax in the config file too, but I am taking a closer look at Haskell and having fun playing with it.

I imagine it has a way to support tagging clients to multiple windows but have never looked into it. There are a great many configuration options available for it. I bound buttons to launch man pages and shell connections and what not with completion in xmonad, but tend to forget to use them.

Hiding windows under other windows sometimes was one or the things I sort of disliked when I played with awesome. That and they seem to change their configuration syntax often, from what I hear. It only hit me once while I was using it, but then again, I only used it for a couple of weeks. It did support a non-Xinerama multi-head setup great though.

http://suasol.wordpress.com/2008/06/28/new-tiling-plugin-for-compiz-fusion-grid/

This gives keyboard-driven window moving/sizing/tiling.

What it lacks:
‘tags’ concept from WMII/awesome
focus left/right/up/down window from WMII/Ion

I haven’t given up on Compiz, and I know my issues are probably a driver issue, but I just don’t have the time that I used to. I’ve just bought an apartment and renovated it pretty much completely, and I’m working full time… Doesn’t leave much time.

I haven’t used Compiz since February though. Like I said, I might go back to Compiz, at which point I expect I’ll do some coding, but I wouldn’t count on it being any time soon. Too much of my energies is being diverted to either Varnish or ‘home improvement’.

As for xmonad, I might indeed give it a try. There seems to be quite a lot of tiling window managers out there…

Have you tried compiz’ non opengl/composite mode? It does decoration reparenting now so it should Just Work [TM] (or at least with kwd).

It would be nice to see you come back to compiz at some point – we’re still plugging away (albeit slowly, maniac has zero time and onestone has limited time, it’s mostly b0le cornelius and myself nowadays). Perhaps take some of your inspiration to the window manager designed to rule the world.

- Sam

P.S: b0le wrote a plugin to do tagging in compiz called ‘tag’ fittingly. I don’t think it’s done yet but give it a try if you can.