December 2009 - xmonad

Update volume without polling?
by Omari Norman 30 Dec '09

30 Dec '09

I like to see my sound volume in my xmobar. Usually I change the volume using keyboard mappings that I defined in my xmonad.hs. These bindings call a simple shell script that changes the volume using amixer. The script then gets the current volume level from amixer and uses echo to stuff it into a named pipe. xmobar then reads the value using PipeReader. This works fine if I change the volume using the xmonad keyboard binding, but not if I change the volume another way, such as with alsamixer. Then the volume shown in my status bar is inaccurate. I could of course simply set up xmobar to periodically read the volume with amixer at, say, every .1 second or 1 second or whatever. What I'm wondering is if there is any way to update the volume without periodically firing up amixer. I haven't even been able to figure out if the current alsa volume is available anywhere in the /proc or /sys directories. There must be some way to do this--for example, if I run alsamixer and change the volume from outside alsamixer, the bars in alsamixer instantly update--but could this easily be done with a shell script too? Thanks for any help! Omari

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Dynamic workspace names
by Tomas Janousek 29 Dec '09

29 Dec '09

Hello, I'm attaching a module X.A.WorkspaceNames (WN) that allows to dynamically assign names to workspaces and to show them in DynamicLog, which is the kind of workflow that I was hoping DynamicWorkspaces (DW) provides. The differences are: DW allows to create, delete and rename workspaces, but their order is somewhat fixed. WN supports only renaming and swapping workspaces, so their order is changeable. With WN, we have a fixed set of workspaces, for example [1..12] assigned to F1..F12, we can rename them and change their order by swapping (just like with X.A.SwapWorkspaces). The workspace tags and their order are intact, so that xmobar shows which key switches to which workspace. This works well with XMonad.Layout.WorkspaceDir. The workflow described in Issue 335 (Manual workspace sorting mode using extensible state) may be more or less achieved using this module. When cleaning it up, I noticed that if implemented as a layout modifier instead of a custom extensible state module, we'd get the swapping behaviour for free. However, if the layout hook in config is changed (which happens sometimes), the names would be lost. That's BTW what happens with WorkspaceDir now, so it might be a good idea to reimplement WorkspaceDir using extensible state and together with the code I have call it DynamicTopicWorkspaces or something like that. I'd like to have your opinion on this so that I can polish it even further. Thanks, -- Tomáš Janoušek, a.k.a. Liskni_si, http://work.lisk.in/

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new contrib module: X.A.DynamicWorkspaceGroups
by Brent Yorgey 29 Dec '09

29 Dec '09

On my dual-head setup at school, I often find myself using workspaces in combination to accomplish some task---e.g. having an emacs window and related things open on one workspace with firefox on the other workspace to refer to some information. While working on the task I want to consider the two workspaces as one "meta-workspace" and be able to quickly switch to it as a whole without thinking about the individual workspaces comprising it. Sometimes I have several of these "meta-workspaces" at a time. So I whipped up a simple new contrib module using extensible state for dynamically creating and managing such workspace groups. I've pushed it to the repo, hopefully others with multi-head setups may find it useful as well. As always, patches and suggestions welcome. -Brent

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ScreenIds
by wagnerdm＠seas.upenn.edu 28 Dec '09

28 Dec '09

If there are n screens, is it safe to assume that they have the exact ScreenIds [0..n]? If not, what's the canonical way to list the screens currently available? ~d

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darcs patch: X.A.MouseResize: assign an appropriate cursor for the ...
by Tomas Janousek 27 Dec '09

27 Dec '09

Sun Dec 27 22:21:40 CET 2009 Tomas Janousek <tomi(a)nomi.cz> * X.A.MouseResize: assign an appropriate cursor for the resizing inpuwin -- Tomáš Janoušek, a.k.a. Liskni_si, http://work.lisk.in/

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Re: [xmonad] Strange spawnPipe error
by Viktor Deryagin 27 Dec '09

27 Dec '09

On Sat, Dec 26, 2009 at 9:47 PM, Ferenc Wagner <wferi(a)niif.hu> wrote: > > Sorry, I can't find any trace of xmonad in the output. I'd recommend > changing the xmonad call in your startup file to something like I chenged my ~/.xinitrc entry to exec strace -f xmonad -o xmonad.strace Output contains errors "createSession: permission denied (Operation not permitted)" (attached). Hope it will help. >Please check that it contains the erring setsid call. But even given a >proper strace output, I can't guarantee a solution. :) Anyway, thanks :)

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Strange spawnPipe error
by Brent Yorgey 26 Dec '09

26 Dec '09

Hi all, I'm getting my laptop re-set up (after installing a new hard drive after the old one died). I've got an up-to-date arch linux installed, and darcs xmonad, using the same config that I had before. However, now when xmonad starts up it fails to start dzen via spawnPipe. Instead, I get this error: createSession: permission denied (Operation not permitted) Due to various debugging activites on my part it is clear that this is being generated by the call to spawnPipe. Anyone have any ideas? I could file this on the bug tracker but it is not at all clear to me that it's an xmonad bug, I was just hoping someone might have an idea what is wrong. I don't really understand what spawnPipe is doing under the hood and what might go wrong. -Brent

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How to set which fonts and theme to use by editing files?
by Yuliang Wang 25 Dec '09

25 Dec '09

In Ubuntu we can do this by running the application called "gnome-appearance-properties", in which we can set the application font to be serif insteand of sans, etc. I'm planning to install Arch linux with Xmonad and no desktop environment. In that case, how do I set the fonts and theme? BTW, what files does the program "gnome-appearance-properties" access to and make changes? -- Sincerely, Yuliang Wang

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Issue 356 in xmonad: Change or add to Actions.Search secure versions of wikipedia and isohunt.
by codesite-noreply＠google.com 24 Dec '09

24 Dec '09

Status: New Owner: ---- New issue 356 by synth17: Change or add to Actions.Search secure versions of wikipedia and isohunt. http://code.google.com/p/xmonad/issues/detail?id=356 Currently wikipedia is setup to use the normal site for searches. "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?go=Go&search=" I think adding or replacing with wikipedia secure search would be an improvement. "https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Special:Search?go=Go&search=" The same for isohunt. "http://isohunt.com/torrents/?ihq=" "https://isohunt.com/torrents/?ihq=" Thanks -- You received this message because you are listed in the owner or CC fields of this issue, or because you starred this issue. You may adjust your issue notification preferences at: http://code.google.com/hosting/settings

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Screen independent workspaces
by Douglas K. Rand 23 Dec '09

23 Dec '09

Is there a way to have workspaces on a per-screen basis? I have 3 displays and on each display I'd like 5 workspaces. Right now my 10 workspaces are shared across all screens, and I'm pretty sure this is the default behaviour. (I'm fairly new to XMonad.) I'm probably going against the grain of XMonad users, but this approach fits me better.

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