I use the i3wm window manager on a clean Arch Linux installation and this combination doesn't do very much out of the box.
- battery.py - If you don't do anything about battery management, your battery will die after draining it several times without you knowing it. I run it in a screen session, but you can daemonize it too.
- i3status.py - My specific version of the i3status bar, with colors and other things (I may look into mouse interaction if I need it)
- brightness.py - As I have an OLED screen (which doesn't have a backlight), I need something to control it. It is also too red, so I adjust the red gamma at the same time.