Hacker News Reader

The downside is that you'll consider complete sentences a waste of time ;)

And don't forget stumpwm (http://www.nongnu.org/stumpwm/), the common lisp window manager !

And xmonad.

As a long-year ion3 user I'd like to second that. The productivity boost is comparable to moving to vim/emacs from notepad.

Does ion3 handle standard .desktop shortcuts? A lot of the smaller WMs (with the exception of XFCE) want to re-implement launchers for every app.

I don't think so, mainly because ion3 doesn't really have a "desktop". It is fully programmable though, so you could easily write a script that searches your $HOME for .desktop shortcuts and adds those to the builtin menu, creates keyboard-shortcuts or even dock-icons for them.

Personally I have never cared much for desktop-shortcuts. My most used applications are all on the keyboard (F1 xterm, F5 browser) and for the less used stuff I simply "F3, amar<TAB><CR>" (runs amarok via the "launch" shortcut).