I went through almost the same story. At some point I was disappointed by KRunner of KDE 4 disappearing with my partially written formulas, then found Qalculat

I went through almost the same story. At some point I was disappointed by KRunner of KDE 4 disappearing with my partially written formulas, then found Qalculate. Then I saw someone at work using i3, and I was amazed and hooked. I changed some keybindings to be more familiar (like alt+f4 close and alt+f2 run). But recently I have been having some dual monitor troubles with it. Maybe I'll try Trinity for a few weeks. And maybe some tiling WM other than i3.