Master-slave layout essentially splits your screen into just two windows. Any new window opening gets automatically assigned as the new master and other windows get demoted to slave and moved down the stack.
I also quite like the stack layout dwm offers. It allows me to navigate through my windows with just up and down keys instead of left/right + up/down.
I’ve looked for dwm alternatives before but haven’t found anything that does everything dwm does. XMonad is interesting but seems daunting to set up (also Haskell)
EDiT: A quick search tells me that you can indeed have a master-slave layout on XMonad.
cheat() { curl cht.sh/$1 }