I did all sorts of desktop and window manager things over the years, but the last few years, I'm very happy with a tweaked tiling window manager with workspaces (currently based around XMonad).
All screen real estate is used for window content, except for a few pixels for borders. Currently no persistent panel or status display of any kind. I already known what workspace I'm on, based on the windows there, and I know what workspaces I've been using. When I need to see the clock, I've rigged a keypress to display it. I occasionally miss having system loadavg info displayed all the time, but I prefer using that screen real estate for an extra lines of code or text.
I've made a bunch of keybindings that start an application or switch focus to it if it's already running.
All screen real estate is used for window content, except for a few pixels for borders. Currently no persistent panel or status display of any kind. I already known what workspace I'm on, based on the windows there, and I know what workspaces I've been using. When I need to see the clock, I've rigged a keypress to display it. I occasionally miss having system loadavg info displayed all the time, but I prefer using that screen real estate for an extra lines of code or text.
I've made a bunch of keybindings that start an application or switch focus to it if it's already running.