I'm seeing a lot of people respond about using similar setups with different tools. It doesn't really matter whether you use awesome/xmonad/ratpoison or something else, but I can tell that the people who built the tools I use think about computers the same way I do (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/The_Arch_Way). I'm striving for this:
http://blog.sanctum.geek.nz/series/unix-as-ide/