I mainly use st because it starts up instantly. I occassionally use alacritty since fonts and emojis are currently broken on my build.

zsh. It's a better interactive shell that isn't fish. I wouldn't use fish because I'm used to writing bash syntax.

I use bspwm. It's very easy to configure, and you can easily script it. I've noticed as more time passes, the more logic I include in my configuration file.