>>6212094i should probably clarify
some floating wm's don't do window decorations (the flashy borders around each window) in which case you'll probably want either gtk-window-decorator or emerald (the latter has thousands of themes on dA and similar). almost all tiling wm's have their own simple decorations and don't play well with standalone decorators.
manual tiling is where all new windows to be tiled are added to one of the existing rows/columns (usually the one the focused window is in). automatic tiling is where adding windows to be tiled causes everything to be rebalanced according to some scheme. awesome starts with a bunch of presets like spiraling inward, three rows weighted 3x2x3, and two columns weighted 2x3. spectrwm and derivatives (i used to use sscrotwm) are notorious for balancing things unpredictably. iirc there were command/hotkeys like "rotate selection clockwise/ccw" and "merge up/down/left/right" that would differ in behavior on numerous conditions, like attempting to merge against a far edge. i recall mashing my keys a lot to get windows into a semi-usable layout which was really funny in retrospect.
