April 2007 - xmonad - Haskell.org

how amenable to making xmonad less minimalistic?
by David Roundy 15 Apr '07

15 Apr '07

Hi all, I've just gotten xmonad running (in a separate X server, for simplicity), and it looks like a nice start, and the code looks pretty elegant, but I'm wondering how amenable it's going to be to added complexity? I'm a current ion3 user who's mostly content, but a bit frustrated by its limitations, and the complexity of configuring it using lua. On the other hand, I've also gotten my setup working pretty much as I like now, so it's not really worthwhile to switch. The features I most like in ion3 that are missing in xmonad are the (very crude) ability to configure the layout based on the windows themselves and the tabs. And what I *really* like (which took a fair amount of sweat and pain) is the ability to set up a single command that prompts me for a directory, and then creates a new workspace with the layout I want, and in it launches several programs (typically an emacs, a couple of terminals and an xclock, but only one terminal on my laptop), with the chosen directory set as the working directory for each program, and any future programs launched in that workspace also has the same working directory. All of this would be much easier to code in Haskell, provided the framework is there. So I'm just wondering if there will be hooks to provide some of this. LayoutDesc, for example, seems to be written in a sufficiently minimalistic way that adding a new layout would seem somewhat like surgery. I imagine we could have a design something like data LayoutDesc = LayoutDesc { !layout :: Rectangle -> [Window] -> [(Window, Rectangle)] } which would have the advantage of allowing commands to introduce arbitrary bindings. The catch is that we've lost the ability to tune the tileFraction, so I've not come up with a real solution. But I'd like to be able to play with new layouts without hacking directly in Operations.hs, and we really shouldn't need to add new parameters to LayoutDesc for every degree of freedom we might want to give our layout. i.e. there's got to be a better way! My first goal (but not most important) would be to ensure that my xclocks always remain square. This would avoid much of the insanity that comes with the current inflexible layout of xmonad (i.e. either the xclock takes up much of the screen and is very distorted, or all but one of my windows is a small square of wasted space). -- David Roundy http://www.darcs.net

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darcs patch: a hypothetical layout approach.
by David Roundy 15 Apr '07

15 Apr '07

Hi all, Here's my sketch of how we might make layouts configurable. It defines a rather silly layout, bound to mod-shift-space. I'm not totally happy with this option, as custom layouts are left out of the cycling with mod-return, and I suspect some sort of a Data.Map.Map from (a modified) Layout to layout functions would be better, so that "builtin" layouts could be treated on a more equal footing with "custom" layouts. David (who once again is spending too much time customizing his window manager...) Sun Apr 15 08:55:17 PDT 2007 David Roundy <droundy(a)darcs.net> * a hypothetical layout approach.

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Redefining modMask
by Bas van Dijk 13 Apr '07

13 Apr '07

Hello again, I would like to assign my modMask to the windows key on my keyboard. Using the xorg tool 'xev' I discovered that the keycode of my windows key is 115. However, setting modMask = 115 in Config.hs doesn't work. Do I have to use a key symbol from Graphics.X11.Types for that? If so, which one? Thanks, Bas van Dijk

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Window resizing
by Edsko de Vries 13 Apr '07

13 Apr '07

Hi, I just downloaded and compiled xmonad, and so far, I quite like it! However, it seems that mod-l and mod-h don't seem to resize the "currently focussed window" as specified in Config.hs, but rather the "first" window in the window layout? Edsko

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Dynamically reloading Config
by Bas van Dijk 13 Apr '07

13 Apr '07

Hello, Is it possible to dynamically reload the Config? In a previous thread dons mentioned mod-ctrl-shift-q which calls 'restart' which exec()s itself. However when I do that xmonad closes and I'm back at my xdm prompt. Maybe that has to do with my ~/.xsession: #!/bin/bash xsetroot -gray & Esetroot ~/pictures/lastlight1280.jpg & firefox http://mail.google.com/mail & /home/bas/bin/xmonad Bas van Dijk P.S. What about using hs-plugins for dynamic configurations?

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some basic xmonad questions
by brad clawsie 13 Apr '07

13 Apr '07

i recently saw xmonad mentioned on reddit, but there was a quick followup that it was not quite ready for public use. has this changed? i am a current dwm user and generally love the tiling concept, although i do not care for dwm's source code-based config system. will xmonad support a plain-text conf file? beyond being written in haskell, are there any compelling features in xmonad (planned or to-date) to differentiate it? how does xmonad compare to dwm with regards to system resrouce use? thanks! brad

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Xmonad funding from Google SoC!
by dons＠cse.unsw.edu.au 12 Apr '07

12 Apr '07

In case anyone wasn't following the SoC stuff closely, I'm happy to note that Spencer has been funded to work on the XCB binding from X to Haskell over the summer. I expect we'll see xmonad used as a good testbed for this binding. http://code.google.com/soc/psu/appinfo.html?csaid=F2EA027407549719 Well done Spencer. -- Don

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Re: darcs patch: mod-wer for Xinerama was inadvertently changed
by Spencer Janssen 12 Apr '07

12 Apr '07

Alec sent me a patch: > Thu Apr 12 09:20:33 EDT 2007 Alec Berryman <alec(a)thened.net> > * mod-wer for Xinerama was inadvertently changed I believe this change was intentional, but I can't remember why. Does anyone have comments on this? Cheers, Spencer Janssen PS - I've copied this mail to the new xmonad(a)haskell.org mailing list, perhaps you could join?

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Welcome
by dons＠cse.unsw.edu.au 11 Apr '07

11 Apr '07

This is a test of the xmonad broadcasting system! Your regularly scheduled programs will resume shortly. -- Don P.S. Currently we're in release mode. Spencer and I are working on a TMR article for the weekend, and generally just trying to clean up code.

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Welcome to the xmonad mailing list!
by dons＠cse.unsw.edu.au 10 Apr '07

10 Apr '07

This is a test of the xmonad broadcasting system! Your regularly scheduled programs will resume shortly. -- Don

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