The great advantage of vim is that it forces you to use only the keyboard. No mouse at all! Mouse is slow. Keyboard is fast (once you get used to it).
F5 Up F2
Left Down Right
Tab Del Backspace
Enter Space ESC
I might just get one to try out something similar. I'm thinking it might also be useful to have a different mode on the mouse that have the buttons map to keys on the numpad for calculations.
[0] https://i3wm.org
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogba...
I chose xmonad at one time, but it was more or less by chance --- someone else used it that I knew, and so I tried it. But I haven't actually compared any.
It's a tiling window manager, as minimal as ratpoison in interface but fully configurable and hackable on runtime, to the point of rebuilding parts of the system as it's running. It's the best WM experience I had since the old Enlightenment and I'm now using it full time. I even wrote some posts about it: https://klibert.pl/#stumpwm-better-modeline https://klibert.pl/#stumpwm
Ah, forgot to mention: it's in Common Lisp, so YMMV by a lot :)
More recently I had occasion to get xmonad working sufficiently like ratpoison to be usable. I expect my setup will grow in interesting ways in the long term, but it's still fairly minimal.