It struck me that using DWM with Monocle layout would be just what I've been looking for on my X220
I cloned the st, dmenu, and dwm from suckless.org and followed the instructions to compile them.
Right now I have Xfce4 installed, so to try out DWM I've added an entry to select it in lightdm
sudo micro /usr/share/xsessions/dwm.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=dwm
Comment=Dynamic window manager
Exec=dwm
Icon=dwm
Type=XSession
In dwm's config.h I set the monocle layout as default and recompiled dwm.
At first glance this looks much better than the i3 window manager, small, neat and fast.
More to come...
ยง