I'm curious why you choose i3 over Awesome or Xmonad. I recently started playing with tiling window managers myself after I saw a i3 presentation on Youtube. When started looking into it I found much more documention on Awesome wm. That's why installed that one on my machine.
I've been using i3 for about two years. I sampled a few other tiling WMs, including awesome, before settling on i3. Realistically there isn't much difference between them in terms of the features that I personally use, but these are the main things that sealed it for me:
I haven't used i3, but I did use awesome for about a year before settling on Xfce. The thing all the tiling window managers don't have is a compositor. I don't care about shadows or animations, but it makes everything seem smoother and faster. The compositor in Xfce uses xrender instead of opengl, so it works pretty well even on low-end machines.
Wish there was a cool reason to tell you, but it was just because somebody happened to be extolling the virtues of i3 in a similar HN discussion a few months back, so I gave it a whirl. I'm sure Awesome and Xmonad are great too, but all my needs are met so haven't really had a reason to shop around.
Looking back on all the hours I used to spend tweaking and fiddling with configs for things that I no longer use has made me sort of a setup minimalist -- anything that's not broken for me usually stays pretty close to stock these days.
I have dabbled with many WMs, including i3. I have settled on awesome. These are the shortcomings of i3 for my usage.
1. Multimonitor. i3 has 9 tags that are shared between all attached monitors. So, if you have 3 monitors, the distribution of tags may turn out to be [1,4,5,6], [2,8], [3,7,9]. You can move tags from monitor to monitor, but AFAIK, you can't exceed 9. I have a habit of keeping email, browser, music player, and chat program on one tab each. So, this limitation of 9 tags just kills it for me.
2. awesome has better placement of floating windows.
3. Vertical task/status bar. This is a minor issue, but I wish i3 comes with one.
If i3 fixes these things, I'd switch to it in a heartbeat. i3 has a saner config, and a much more elegant tiling layout.
You can certainly have more than 9 tags on i3. In fact you can have tags with arbitrary names. They are a bit more difficult to manage with the default config, because only the default 9 have keybindings. But you can create your own tags and bind keys to assign windows to them or switch to them with a custom config.
You can also use a tabbed window layout (Super + E) to keep multiple programs full-screen on one tag. Then you can switch between them with the tabs at the top or Super + J, Super + ;.
