Lot of great recommendations so far, but I will mention some of my favourites in case they were missed in the other comments: hyprland
for a Wayland compositor / window manager, so you can easily set up keybinds for whatever you want, rofi
for launching programs (and much more, I even made rofi-games
so I can launch all my games from one place), and yazi
for the file manager (use a lot of TUIs in general though).
You CAN go more extreme with the no mouse journey by using something like qutebrowser
as your browser but I just use Firefox/librewolf with vimium c
and find that’s good enough for me.
Realised I never responded to this - I’ll hold the L on that reasoning, didn’t think that through. I grant that you may be right about the stars, but I’m still doubtful due to my anecdotal experience of seeing a lot of activity around the repo + discord server from 4k stars to over 10k (while I was following it semi-closely). Entirely possible though, of course.