The keybindings for XMonad are pretty similar to the keybindings for GNU screen - if you already spent time getting comfortable with screen, it won't take you t

The keybindings for XMonad are pretty similar to the keybindings for GNU screen - if you already spent time getting comfortable with screen, it won't take you too long to pick up. dwm is a tiling window manager with very similar keybindings to XMonad, and it's written in C. I used it for a bit before I switched to XMonad... I mostly discovered that if you were fine with the default configuration, they were largely interchangeable, but XMonad had a more sizable community and much more options for configuration. The config is also not that bad to copy/paste and treat as just a bizarre config file syntax (of which I think we've all used many). Personally I think a tiling window manager works at least as well with 1-2 windows on the screen as with tons. I actually don't use one now (I'm mostly on Windows for work) but I extensively used it on my netbook which didn't have the screen space to effectively use more than two windows.