I would definitely recommand ion, it is just the perfect window manager for coders :) I've been a happy fvwm user since 2.7, then a couple years ago happened to walk behind a friend who had ion as his window manager. He had his screen split in such a way that he had permanent view over his editor, his compile term, his debug term and documentation, and the sexiest of all is that each little frame could be arranged as he wanted and that he was almost never using his mouse. I installed ion, and since then I am totally addicted and find it difficult to work with any other window manager.
if you don't care about fancy modern looking window managers, it is definitely worth a try.
