The different environments all have their own shortcuts, but you can definitely customize things. Might I suggest awesomewm? It takes about two days of reference back to the man page (keep it up in its own tag ;) ) but after that you generally have the hang of it, and it has far more advanced features for workspaces/tags than the other players, at least the floating WMs.

I've never really liked Gnome much, you might want to try some of the other DEs out there, especially since Gnome is pushing a whole new interface in a few months so you'll have to learn new stuff anyway.