I use wmii with some minor customizations. I have one 30" full of 256-color rxvt-unicode windows and a smaller monitor running chromium. Generally communications (mutt, irssi) runs down the right edge of the 30" and then there are 2-3 columns of terminals running vim or zsh.

One killer feature of wmii is its use of 'tags' instead of virtual desktops. Windows can be assigned to multiple tags. I tend to have tags per task, so task switching is as simple as switching desktop tags.