It's not what you're asking, but I've always had similar problems with tiling window managers. They want to use a lot of keybindings, typically keyed on Alt as

It's not what you're asking, but I've always had similar problems with tiling window managers. They want to use a lot of keybindings, typically keyed on Alt as the modifier; the problem is that lots of programs such as Emacs and Firefox also want to use Alt bindings. Eventually I settled on stumpwm because the default bindings didn't interfere. In the same way Emacs commands often start with a C-x followed by some other key (e.g. C-x C-c to quit), stumpwm prefixes every command with C-t. So to split a pane, you do C-t s, then C-t n to jump to the next pane, C-t k to kill the window in the current pane, etc. The only thing it conflicts with is opening a new tab in a browser, and you can accomplish that by hitting 'C-t t' which quickly becomes second nature. The other alternative is to use a mouse-oriented WM like fvwm or rio, but that's easy and doesn't involve memorizing dozens of key bindings ;)