I'm on OSX. I typically have Firefox, Terminal, and TextWrangler open while I work through Zed Shaw's LPtHW course. What window manager should I use?
If you're looking to up your terminal skills, I'd recommend looking at something like tmux.
XQuartz is nice, but you're still subject to the OS X mouse acceleration etc.
I suppose when I said "mouse acceleration" I really meant "mouse lag".
In some ways I prefer it to strict tiling window management like awesome or xmonad.
You lose the "windows automatically tile" functionality, but the other side of that is that it's easier to break the paradigm for when you don't want to tile.
free unlimited trial: http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/
or $14 for a license
ShiftIt (Free/OSS): https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt/tree/shiftit16
DoublePane ($3): http://5amcode.com/
Tyler ($10): http://blog.reflare.com/tagged/tyler
SizeUp ($13): http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/
Divvy ($14): http://mizage.com/divvy/
There are some old versions of ShiftIt available in the GitHub downloads, but you might want to compile a more recent version yourself. It's what I use on my 11" MacBook Air, where I mostly use the left-half, right-half, full-screen, and center-window commands. If your use case would be similar, DoublePane might be an easier choice, though it doesn't look like it does centering.
I just stumbled into it, I recommend watching the video.
The window manager situation on OSX is still dire.
The whatever proprietary program Apple uses in OS/X isn't cutting it for me. I spend too much time getting the windows how I want them and it's never quite right. I would like to automatically tessellate my windows as seen in the GOOMWWM. Is there a way to do that in OSX, and if so, what is this type of software called?