To add to this, if you just use i3 you may miss some niceties from a full desktop environment. Fortunately it is easy to run xfce and replace the window manager with i3.
What are some things you may miss? I think it may be perfect for me. I live in either the browser or terminal.
When I ran i3 without xfce if I wanted a battery monitor, I needed to find a daemon to do that. If I wanted an icon to adjust my volume, I had to find a daemon to do that. I wasn't getting notifications from apps because I forgot to install a notifications daemon. XFCE gives you all those things built in, and many more that can be easily added to the panel without having to go find another app.