I switched to Xubuntu and have grown to love XFCE more than I loved Gnome2. Best features: ability to script and directly hack configuration settings, basic features for window tiling. With scripts I can fully configure a dev box with a single command.
Interesting, I wondered if anyone else was playing with XFCE config this way. I have the important parts of my .config/xfce4 folder under git and replicated across 3 machines, which a branch for dual-screen tweaks on the desktop, etc. etc. I thought it was so cool that you can just figure this stuff out and get on with it!
My old setup had a mix of single-monitor and dual-monitor machines. Now I use single-monitor on all machines and found you can replicate the entire .config/xfce4 directory, even with different screen sizes. Everything syncs perfectly - Hotkeys, Menus, Panels etc. Works with git or rsync - so simple.
I use xfce but I only use xrandr (not depends on xfce) to switch between monitors and don't really know what other scripts are useful or good to have. (or what can I achieve with scripting)
There are a few options for scripting xfce4. You can use xfconf-query from the command line or a script. You can edit the config files in .config/xfce4. You can sync the whole .config/xfce4 directory from machine to machine - that works especially fine if all the machines run a single monitor. You can make everything repeatable using shell scripts or a configuration system like Ansible.
