<p>I find the concept of the programmable, tiling, keyboard-focuessed window manager <a href="http://www.modeemi.fi/~tuomov/ion/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">ion3</a> very appealing, but I think it takes some time to customize it to your needs until you can really evaluate this totally different UI-concept.</p>

<p>Therefore, I would like to read reviews of people who tried it for a longer time as environment for programming (in particular using emacs/gcc).</p>

<p>(The policies of the ion3-author concerning linux-distros are not easy to follow for me, but this should not be the point here...)</p>

I've used it off and on for the last few years, I think its a great window manager, but I keep crawling back to kde3 whatever I use.
Its however difficult to put into quantifiable terms why this happens, but its right up there with the gnome-vs-kde battle. Neither side can understand the other.
I would also just love to have kicker + ion3, but they don't gel awfully well.
Moving applications between tiles ( something I tend to do lots ) also is a bit inefficient ( too addicted to the mouse )
( Kicker + Evilwm is a good combination, but evilwm just can't handle stacking in a user-friendly way )