In the quest of the perfect window manager, lots of people fall in love with the well known metacity (Gnome's window manager) or KWin (KDE's one) because they are included in a full featured desktop. Other people who look for lightweight or geeky window manager use fluxbox, ion or the brand new compiz/beryl with all its effects (mmmmh, wobbly windows !).

When it comes to work, I really need something fast and efficient and that's what Openbox is !

• lightweight, run on "not so new" computers
• easy to configure with comprehensive and text based configuration files
• keyboard shortcuts management included (including windows move and resize)
• comes with themes so you can change the way it looks (even the window buttons order)

So here's how to cook it :

• Grab and install openbox (available in most ditribs)
• Append it a minimal task bar and a lightweight file manager (let's say xfce4-panel and thunar)
• Choose a clean wallpaper
• Tweak it with a dedicated menu file (example menu file)
• Do the same for the keyboard shortcuts (example keyboard shortcuts file)

And voilà ! Taste with your prefered keyboard (i.e. : in my config Mod4 + right moves the window to the right, Mod4+Ctrl+Right extend the window to the right).

One more thing, the Openbox documentation is very clean and understandable, so I recommand you to have a look at it ...