My desktop isn't too fancy, plain i3 with no desktop background. Here's my dotfiles.
What I tend to use instead of my desktop background is my chromium new tab page, which is here 
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As far as terminals go, I use terminology, a strange terminal that has some fancy features. Here's a screenshot:
The font is Inconsolata patched for Powerline.
I have my i3 startup scripted to open all sorts of things and place them on the right workspaces and monitors when I open my PC, this means I always turn my PC off because there's next to no effort cost of turning it back on again.
One of the best tricks I've learned in i3 is to use chromium --app windows to place webapps such as discord and tweetdeck into borderless windows that works great with i3, especially as their X11 instance value is based on their URL, so they can be easily differentiated in the config.
I have a pretty nice vim config, imho. I use gvim a lot, but sometimes use vim on remote servers too. It's got some awesome completion from YouCompleteMe - when it works. Here's a screenshot: 
I don't use XMPP, but you can contact me on several IRC networks as RX14.
Apart from this i'm not quite sure what else I can show you, but I'm sure i've forgotten something.
